The increasing interest on the use of helical piles to support offshore facilities has motivated the development of researches on this type of foundation. Literature presents some studies on helical piles in dense sand that disregard the effects that pile installation could cause on soil as a 'wished-in-place' condition is considered. Normally this condition is adopted because of the difficulty in reproducing the pile installation according to the in-situ procedure. However, some previous studies have shown that the failure mechanism in uplift is controlled by the disturbed-non disturbed condition of the soil around the pile, mainly for dense sand condition. On the other hand, the literature also brings some studies arguing that the pile installation little influences both failure mechanism and uplift performance. Therefore, the current study uses results of centrifuge modelling to compare the monotonic uplift performance of single-helix piles in very dense sand installed via two different procedures: i) by placing the model pile during sand bed pluviation, which intends to avoid any soil disturbance ('wished-in-place' condition) and; ii) by screwing the model pile in flight with torque and downward crowd force applied simultaneously. The results show that the model pile installed in flight showed uplift capacity at least 60% greater than the 'wished-in-place' model pile, also accompanied by a greater axial stiffness. The unexpected poorer performance of the 'wished-in-place' model piles suggests that the model may have acted as an obstacle for the sand grains during pluviation, which resulted in density variation of the sand around the model and, consequently, provided lower uplift capacity compared to the in-flight installation case.