For many Texans, the current economy means buckling down, working hard to keep their jobs and compromising their ambitions to maintain something close to the status quo.

Not so for some professionals who are pushing back from their desks and computer monitors and looking to the skies to reinvent themselves at Alamo Helicopter Tours. Not as passengers or tourists, for which the helicopter company is known, but as students learning the art and science of being a working pilot.

Alamo Helicopter Tours launched its business in 2008, offering day and evening tourist flights over San Antonio's many landmarks and the rugged, yet beautiful Texas Hill Country. They were soon in demand by companies seeking aerial surveys and by ranchers seeking wildlife surveys and predator control.

But last year, Alamo Helicopter Tours became a beacon of hope for people looking to do something new and different with their lives.

When Alamo Helicopter Tours added a certified flight school in 2009, men and women, from all walks of life have found their way to the company's headquarters at the recently renovated Stinson Municipal Airport. These professionals aren't chasing childhood dreams of recreationally flying and being free of the constraints waiting for them on the ground. They're searching out new long-term careers as skilled helicopter pilots.

"All of our instructors are also working in the field," stresses Alamo's co founder Stacy Riggs. "They fly all over the U.S. and bring their skills and experience back to our students. They are doing more than teaching how to fly. They are teaching how to make a living by flying."

Just how the instructors share their wisdom is rather unique, Riggs says, for the industry and for the aspiring pilots being mentored.

"When the opportunities arise, our students can accompany their instructors on working jobs – surveying, aerial photo shoots – and those flights are teaching our students how to apply piloting skills to lucrative, real world jobs," he says.

When students walk away from Alamo after graduation, they will have their names on five different flight certificates, giving them the foundation for a future career as pilots. And they will have gained much more than ornate pieces of paper. Experience doing real work flying is the truly valuable and marketable asset they have earned over the past nine to 18 months.

"My pilot instructor works flying choppers for a news channel," Justin Little, the flight school's very first student, attests. "He explains everything to me. Why he's doing what he's doing. What to do in certain hypothetical situations like different types of emergency landings to following a moving object through an urban area. That might be in the books, but it's different when it's live."

The hands-on, in-the-trenches approach to instruction has lead Alamo to flourish. Thirteen months ago, they didn't even have a flight school to speak of. Demand from potential students and the marketplace has changed that rapidly, leaving many to believe that there is something better out there, and up there, for them.

For those interested in learning whether a career as a professional helicopter pilot is for them, Alamo Helicopter Tours offers Discovery Flights, an introduction to flying, for $150. For more information on Alamo Helicopter Tours or on Helicopter Flight Training, call (210) 287-5797 or visit www.alamohelicoptertours.com.