Prism Defence has had the vision to establish itself as an international leader in ship-to-helicopter integration.

The specialty entails training pilots to safely land choppers on ships in extreme environmental conditions during the day or night. The company’s niche is in rotary wing flight tests, with Prism members conducting such trials for the navies of Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and Sweden. Notably, trials with the Danes and Swedes has taken the company’s pilots and engineers to the Faroe Islands in the north Atlantic Ocean and off the coast of Somalia, where a European armed force is preventing piracy.

CEO Greg Ward explains that ship-to-helicopter integration can be a life-threatening task. “In simple terms, you’re landing helicopters on the back of a moving platform and that platform pitches and rolls as it moves through the water,” he says. “There’s a whole range of problems you encounter trying to land in that environment, like clearly if you roll too far, the aircraft could topple or slide off the deck.”

Founded in 2004, Prism Defence employs flight test specialists, aerospace engineers, operational specialists and computer scientists who provide consulting services to the defence forces on helicopter flight testing and pilot and ship staff training. This year, its main export activity has been with the Brunei Armed Forces through a contract that has contributed to export earnings growth of 36 per cent in 2010-11. The company also exports its services to Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Scotland and New Zealand.

Ward says the Adelaide-based company has deliberately targeted a niche area. “There’s limited competition in this space,” he says. “In fact, there are very few organisations around the world that do this and most of those organisations are government or military organisations.”

Service excellence has led to strong organic export growth for the business, according to Ward. “Our first customer was in Denmark and then we did some work for the Swedish Navy not long after that, and progressively we’ve added other navies like Norway and New Zealand and elsewhere to our customer list.”

He believes there are significant ongoing prospects to service a range of naval and private entities that operate helicopters and need to land them on moving platforms. “They could be coast guards or rich people with a big yacht who don’t realise they run the risk of killing themselves every time they fly to it. So there’s a range of opportunities out there for us.”

Ward believes that innovation has been instrumental to Prism Defence’s export gains. “We invest a lot of time and effort in getting really smart people on board who are experts in their respective fields from around the world. We’ve got a number of PhDs here, for example, that we’ve recruited from either the United Kingdom or from various parts of Australia to try and bring them together to help us advance both the process and the technology and the systems.”

The advantage of being innovative and clever, he says, is that “it allows us to do things quicker, more efficiently and therefore cheaper”.

Ward adds that the company also takes a proactive approach to marketing and procurement.

“A large part of our marketing effort is to let ship builders and aircraft manufacturers and even other navies, for example, understand that it’s really important that they consider this sort of analysis and training.”

The company monitors naval procurement programs so it knows when new aircraft or ships are being brought into service which may require platform landings. “If they’re building ships with flight decks or buying new helicopters, that’s largely where our opportunities come from,” Ward says.

Safe landings come from understanding the prevailing weather conditions and associated risks.

Prism Defence won the Small to Medium Services Award at the 49th Australian Export Awards in December 2011.