Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  The UK government’s Department of Trade handled bids from oil and gas companies for drilling concessions. Nobody really knew where the gas and oil were – nobody even knew for sure that gas and oil were present in commercial quantities – and it was clear that this was going to involve some of the most expensive and difficult drilling ever attempted. The oil companies were being forced to take the most enormous gamble, but they couldn’t afford to sit it out. It was a massive exercise for BHL to identify who was bidding for what, who was likely to win, what helicopter support might be needed and where it would have to be based. Life was a concentrated round of visits to oil company contacts, phone calls to names in my voluminous contacts book, and shoulder-rubbing at industry events where the North Sea was virtually the only topic on everyone’s mind.

  I have to say I was more worried about getting into the North Sea than I admitted to my fellow directors. Apart from fighting off smaller independent companies, on all North Sea contracts I was competing with BEA Helicopters, a company which, underwritten by the state, could go out and buy whatever equipment it needed. North Sea oil exploration was new in every respect, and even in the 1960s there were still people who said it could never be developed – everything had to be invented to fit that desperately unforgiving environment. Nobody had drilled so far out and so deep under water before, in such perilous conditions where foul weather and icing made aviation hazardous. In many ways it was similar to the Antarctic, where I had pioneered helicopter flying in the 1950s. I’m proud to say that Bristow Helicopters Ltd developed the systems that have made the North Sea one of the safest helicopter operating environments on earth, where hundreds of thousands of people are now moved annually on schedule. Had I said in 1960 that it could be done, I would have been laughed at.

  Furthermore, had Bristow Helicopters not tied up with Air Holdings Ltd in 1960, it’s questionable whether it could have afforded to compete on the North Sea at all. At Air Holdings I was dealing with friendly shareholders and friendly capital, rather than being in the grip of a bank. Myles Wyatt and Freddie Laker were behind us all the way, and the directors were leaders of important companies who could afford to take the long view.

  The first British drilling concessions were awarded in the southern North Sea 1964, and Bristow Helicopters Ltd was among those allowed by the winning companies to tender for helicopter services. There were eleven separate contracts in play, and for BHL it was a vast costing exercise that stretched our resources to the limit. The lights burned day and night at Redhill as I worked on the figures with the accountants. All our international experience had not prepared the company for this. There were so many imponderables. Onshore helicopter operating sites were identified. Helicopters were selected to suit various requirements and finance was in place, depending on how much of the business market we could win. Our costings were aggressive. The thought of getting none of the British North Sea business was my constant nightmare. In October of 1964, after weeks of waiting, the winners were announced. Of the eleven contracts, Bristow Helicopters Ltd had won ten.

  Now the hard work really began. We set up a base at Sunderland Airport, which is now a car factory, and flew the first revenue sector on the North Sea in February of 1965, taking passengers to a jack-up rig called Mr Cap, owned by a peculiar Texan known to everyone as ‘The Colonel’. Mr Cap was 165 miles out, which made it one of the longest routes we had ever flown over water; it was done in a piston-engined Whirlwind. Within months we’d set up new bases at Grimsby and Scarborough in Lincolnshire, and at North Denes in Norfolk. From the outset I decided that operations were not sustainable over the North Sea in single-engined helicopters and introduced the twin-turbine Westland Wessex 60 into the market. The Wessex was an excellent aircraft in many ways, carried fourteen passengers and was loved by the pilots because it had good power margins, even with one engine inoperative. The Ministry of Aviation had no experience of helicopter operations so Bristow Helicopters Ltd effectively wrote the rules for operating on the North Sea and developed them as technical advances allowed. Despite the warnings of those who said it couldn’t be achieved, my goal was 100 per cent safety. Nothing less would do; I was a pilot myself and had operated in dangerous conditions, and to me there was no such thing as an acceptable accident level other than zero.

  As well as supplying the drilling rigs BHL became a de facto search and rescue service because nobody else had the capacity to do the job. We had helicopters with winches, we had good pilots, many of them ex-Navy, and it was accepted that when lives were at stake BHL would fly, whatever the weather. The first Bristow rescue in which many lives were saved was back in the Bolivia days, when a flash flood came down the hillside and washed away a town. Alastair Gordon and Ken Bradley flew Bell 47s with rope ladders, kept flying all day and completely lost count of the number of people they lifted out of the mud. I never kept a running total of the people BHL rescued, but it certainly ran into tens of thousands. Two of the most memorable rescues happened in the storms of 1968, the first in March when a semi-submersible called the Ocean Prince, drilling for Burmah Oil on the Dogger Bank, was hit by hurricane-force winds which literally tore it apart. One of BHL’s captains, Bob Balls, flew out to the rig from our base at Grimsby – a distance of a hundred miles – in a Wessex with minimum fuel and transferred the forty-five members of the crew, in three trips, to another rig twenty miles away. Just as he lifted off with the last survivors the helicopter platform collapsed beneath him and the Ocean Prince sank. Bob won an OBE for his actions. His citation read: ‘. . . but for his initiative, bravery and splendid airmanship, the members of the Ocean Prince crew would have probably lost their lives.’

  Later that same year a Phillips Petroleum production platform in the Hewett Field suffered a gas blowout in a Force 9 gale. The crew tried to abandon the platform, but as the support vessel Hector Gannet manoeuvred close in to pick up the workers she was hurled against the supports by mountainous waves and holed. She capsized and sank, throwing her crew and the rescued men into the sea. We sent five Wessex 60s to the rig, twenty miles off Cromer, four of them to land on the burning platform to lift off twenty-nine survivors. The fifth Wessex was equipped with a winch and lifted fifteen injured men off a trawler called the Boston Hornet, which had picked up survivors of the Hector Gannet. Three men died, but it could have been much worse.

  Over the years Bristows and its pilots won award after award for saving life at sea. In November of 1969 BHL helicopters picked up twenty-two men from a platform called the Constellation when it began to sink in a storm while under tow. On New Year’s Day 1974 we lifted fifty-six men off Mobil’s Trans Ocean 3 drilling rig 100 miles off Shetland in pitch darkness and foul weather and carried them to other rigs nearby; the Trans Ocean 3 sank that night. Later we took almost 100 men off the Transworld 62 when it broke its moorings; the rig survived. In the winter of 1979 BHL carried out the biggest-ever air rescue of men at sea when more than 500 crew were taken off a derrick barge called Hermod, which had broken its anchor cables in a storm. The winds were gusting above eighty knots, visibility was dreadful and the waves reached forty feet. The barge weighed 100,000 tons but was being thrown about like a cork. A dozen S61s and some Pumas flew out from Aberdeen to take the men off. They made two round trips each, landing on the Hermod as it snaked and heaved in conditions far beyond any established limits for safe helicopter operation. The last men were taken off in darkness, and there wasn’t a single casualty. For that rescue, Bristows was awarded a prestigious Helicopter Association International citation.

  BHL flew many ad hoc missions of mercy, but one tragedy forced us to introduce strict controls on medical call-outs. There had been an explosion on board a supply boat carrying seismic pots out in the North Sea – one of the pots had gone off in a man’s groin and he needed to be got to hospital. As usual, it was pitch dark and the weather was indescribably foul. The rescue crew and paramedics on the Shell-Brent offshore-based SAR unit got together and set off into the teeth of t
he storm in a Bell 212, and they were never heard of again. We expended endless resources trying to find out what happened but we had very little to go on; we came to believe the pilot had been circling to search for the boat and flew into the sea. But two days later the supply vessel turned up in Aberdeen with the injured man aboard in what was by no means a life-threatening condition. As a result we introduced a system where emergencies had to be filtered up the line to establish the degree of urgency and risk to life.

  By 1967, it was becoming obvious that everything we’d gambled on the North Sea was going to pay off. Not only was there gas in commercial quantities in the southern North Sea but it seemed probable that it would be dwarfed in value by the oil bonanza that was taking shape in the north. I was in the process of planning a major presence there, one that would ultimately create the busiest heliport in the world. But once again fate had other plans for me and developing helicopter services on the North Sea had to be temporarily left to my executives.

  CHAPTER 17

  Airline Ego Trip

  In 1965 Freddie Laker’s son Kevin was involved in a dreadful accident on the Leatherhead bypass in a sports car Freddie had given him for his seventeenth birthday. Kevin lay in hospital in a coma for four days, during which time Freddie rarely left his bedside. The doctors said he was getting better, then on the fifth day, he died. Kevin was a nice boy, not at all a tearaway – he wasn’t even driving the car when it crashed. In my opinion Freddie became seriously unbalanced from that day. Joan took to drink, and while Freddie tried to carry on as before, he never quite managed to pull it off.

  In contrast to my own position at Air Holdings Ltd, where BHL profits were flowing and the gambles I’d taken on the North Sea were starting to pay off, Freddie’s troubles were mounting. British United Airways, of which he was managing director, wasn’t making any money and I believe that Freddie’s talent for self-publicity grated on Sir Myles Wyatt, who got the impression from reading the newspapers that Freddie Laker owned the company. Freddie had never had the relationship I enjoyed with Myles; I crewed for Myles on his yacht Bloodhound and we shot on each other’s estates. Myles even claimed I’d saved his life once, when he’d collapsed with an angina attack on a shoot and I’d given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while someone drove off for a doctor. Freddie’s connection with Myles was strictly on a business footing.

  I was in my office in BUA’s headquarters at Portland House when Freddie came storming out of Myles Wyatt’s office one afternoon in a towering rage. Reg Cantello and I calmed him down and got the story out of him. Freddie had been visiting Aviation Traders at Southend on one of his tours around the BUA companies, and a senior manager there had told him he’d heard BUA was on the verge of taking over another small independent airline, Channel Airways. Freddie dismissed the rumour as nonsense but the manager, and old and trusted friend of Freddie’s, said he had it on good authority that it was going to happen. Freddie got in his car and drove straight back to Portland House, where he walked into Myles Wyatt’s seventh-floor office and asked him about it. Myles said yes, he had commenced negotiations with Channel Airways and BUA could be buying the company. Freddie went into orbit. He had good business reasons for opposing such a purchase, because he believed Channel Airways to be on the verge of going broke anyway, but he also harboured a visceral personal dislike for Jack Jones, who owned the company. A high-volume slanging match erupted between Freddie and Myles, with Myles eventually telling Freddie it was none of his business who he negotiated with.

  ‘None of my business?’ shouted Freddie. ‘I’m the managing director of the company, you’re about to saddle me with a lame duck airline, and it’s none of my business? If you go ahead and buy Jones out, I’m resigning!’

  I thought Freddie was taking a reasonable position and that Myles Wyatt should have kept him informed. Reg Cantello was of the same mind. Together we went to see Myles. ‘Look, you can’t expect Freddie to take this lying down,’ I said. ‘He’s the MD and he thinks you are negotiating behind his back.’

  But Myles would not be moved. Channel Airways negotiations continued without Freddie’s involvement, and relations between the two men broke down completely. I was in a difficult position, being good friends with both of them. They were like a pair of bull elephants charging at each other over what the rest of us thought was the stupidest thing. Freddie wouldn’t give an inch, nor would Myles. For several days nobody knew whether or not Freddie had actually resigned. He kept coming into Portland House and doing his job, and nothing seemed to have changed.

  On the evening before Kevin’s funeral I flew down to Freddie’s house at Ashtead and parked the Widgeon in the garden. Freddie was out, but I had arranged with Joan to spend the night. Freddie got back after midnight, raging against the world, angrily demanding to know who’d left the helicopter on his lawn, but he calmed down when he found out it was mine. In the morning the hearse arrived and the coffin was loaded, and we sat in the kitchen having a near-silent breakfast. I was sitting opposite Freddie at the table when the phone rang, and Joan answered.

  ‘It’s for you, Freddie,’ she said. ‘It’s Myles.’

  From where I was sitting I could hear snatches of Myles’s distant voice on the phone. ‘You’ve got to make up your mind, Freddie,’ he said. ‘Are you resigning or aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, right now I’m taking my son to be buried,’ Freddie replied quietly. ‘The hearse is outside and we’re going off now. It’ll have to wait. I’ll let you know.’

  Myles was unmoved. ‘I need to know now, Freddie! Are you resigning or aren’t you?’ And Freddie shouted down the phone: ‘Oh, fuck you, I’ve resigned!’ I was appalled at Myles’s inexcusable behaviour. We went off and buried Kevin. Freddie never went back to Portland House; instead, he set about forming Laker Airways and turning the airline industry on its head.

  I lost some of my faith in Myles Wyatt thereafter, although he treated me with the same genial diffidence as ever. Laker’s resignation from BUA coincided with the fifth anniversary of the Air Holdings Ltd buyout of Bristow Helicopters, and I went into Myles’s office to tell him we – George Fry, Jack Woolley, Alan Green and I – wanted to buy some of the company back.

  ‘Five years!’ Myles said. ‘Hasn’t the time flown?’

  I had been conscious from the start that Bristow Helicopters Ltd didn’t really dovetail into the BUA structure, nor was it central to Air Holdings’ strategy. There were no major economies of scale, but on the other hand BHL was making money and Myles Wyatt didn’t want to let go of it completely. For my part I wanted a meaningful shareholding, but at the same time I had a gut feeling that I wouldn’t be able to afford the sophisticated helicopters that would be needed to handle the North Sea work in the decades to come. At the time we were finding it relatively easy to get credit for overseas business. The British and French governments had export credit guarantee banks that were prepared to lend money at favourable rates, and I took full advantage of them. But I couldn’t rely on them enough to bet the company’s future on their willingness to lend. We needed a strong partner, and maintaining the link with Air Holdings seemed the best route to take. Fry, Woolley and Green had no shareholding at the time, and they wanted a stake in a company they saw as having excellent prospects. ‘We really ought to be doing some of this work for ourselves,’ George Fry had said to me.

  Now, Myles Wyatt was weighing his options. He certainly didn’t want to lose the four of us. ‘What does the future hold?’ he asked.

  ‘The future is good,’ I said. ‘So much depends on whether they’re going to sell all these concessions in the North Sea, and what is found when they do. The industry says there’s profitable gas and oil there, and they can’t get to it without helicopters.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’d like to buy thirty-four per cent, with five per cent each for Fry, Woolley and Green,’ I said.

  ‘How much will you pay?’ Myles asked.

  We agreed the price would
be forty-nine per cent of the net asset value at 31 December 1965, a deal not finally consummated until 1968, but at 1965 prices.

  Papers were drawn up, and while Air Holdings Ltd retained the majority shareholding, the four of us were once again working on our own account. I did not know at the time how radically Air Holdings Ltd was going to change. Four of the original shareholders were planning to invest elsewhere. They couldn’t see how independent airlines could prosper and grow when the government awarded the lucrative high-density routes to BEA and BOAC and the independents were left to fight over the scraps. For the time being, Anderson of P&O stayed in, as did the Vesteys, but the Cayzers were slowly building a majority stake. In 1960 George Fry had run his accounting rule over the original companies involved in Air Holdings Ltd and assessed them as being as powerful as BOAC itself. They had Lazards as a banker, and they’d looked on aviation as a logical extension to their shipping interests. But five years later, their attention was drifting elsewhere. Containerisation was revolutionising the shipping industry and between them they formed Ocean Containers Ltd – OCL – to take advantage of new opportunities. Board meetings were full of talk about container ships, and BUA increasingly became a distraction. They had better things to do with their money than to tie it up in marginally profitable airlines.

  After Freddie Laker’s resignation Myles Wyatt employed Max Stuart-Shaw as managing director at BUA. Stuart-Shaw came from Central African Airways and was said to have experience of operating Vickers VC-10s, although as far as I was aware the only VC-10s that carried Central African Airways passengers were BOAC aircraft on a code-sharing agreement. Stuart-Shaw was an affable man, eager to please and pleasant company, but at Board meetings he was totally unprepared, unable or unwilling to perform in front of the shareholders. I liked him tremendously, but he was never on top of the job. He used to complain that he’d have a queue of people outside his office from 8 am to 6 pm, and he wondered how Laker had ever managed to see them all. Quite simple – Freddie would have had them all in at once. He’d have given them their orders in rapid-fire while simultaneously arranging lunch and instructing his bookie, and all the while he’d have his trousers round his ankles while his tailor measured him for a suit. Freddie was a natural entrepreneur, and he knew every inch of his business. He’d started out as a tea boy at Short Brothers, became an apprentice engineer and studied maths and economics at night school, and he’d been Jim Mollison’s flight engineer before qualifying as a pilot. He made his first fortune at the time of the Berlin Airlift, then created Aviation Traders and Channel Air Bridge before selling out to Air Holdings. He was the making of BUA as an airline operating in the scheduled and charter markets. His departure was a seminal event in aviation history because he went on to pioneer low-fare flying, to begin dismantling the regulatory cartels and create the airline structure we know today. Max Stuart-Shaw was not cut of the same cloth, and under his leadership – or lack of it – BUA went from a marginally profitable charter company to one that was £16 million in the red.