Why does the name "Silver State Helicopters' keep coming to mind?

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all ... ces-prison

I don't know which Jerry you are referring to, but the Virginia scam is nothing new in aviation. Dodgy flight schools have been doing this for over a century.

LMGTFY:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_ ... elicopters

Jerry Airola, Silver State Helicopters bought out one of our FBOs, Peak Aviation here in Pueblo. Started up his helicopter school and took 50 or 60 people for all they had. He also swindled Fred Phillips the owner of Peak out of a bunch of money. Jerry was a real big time grifter.When he went bankrupt a lot of people in Pueblo came up short. One of my friends got his heli cert from Silver State here in Pueblo. My friend had enough money to pay cash as he went. Yep, Jerry the scammer-------

I got 4.5 hours solo in an R-22 and a useless headset (yah, I know they make adapters) for my thousands of $$. Meanwhile the "lawyers" for the plaintiffs in the class-action made off with $4.5M. Funny thing was, although my schedule availability was 24/7, amazingly enough I could only manage to get scheduled for a couple hours a week, at most.

My plane at HEF was a few doors down from that school. They had a little pilot-shop and I would pick up sectionals (anyone remembers those ?) and AFDs there.

From what I could tell, back then the school was a legit operation. They had a handful or Robinsons and a in-house mechanic and they were out instructing every day. At one point I was thinking about getting a helicopter add-on with them, but then sanity prevailed (iow I realized that there was no point in blowing money on the add-on if I didn't buy a helo).