by Alan Bristow
The rate of expansion caused financial headaches, but I felt secure in the knowledge that as part of Air Holdings Ltd I had access to ‘friendly capital’. British & Commonwealth owned a number of finance houses, and when I found the need for a million pounds to keep the business steaming ahead I mentioned it to Nick Cayzer. The money was forthcoming through a B&C vehicle called Gartmore, but I was astounded at the interest rates and charges. ‘We could have got the money a good deal cheaper in the open market,’ George Fry complained. I made sure the loan was paid back within a year and never went to B&C for capital again.
So rapid was the expansion, and so pressing the demand for more S61 helicopters, that it created major cash flow difficulties and looked likely to threaten our market share unless urgent remedial measures were taken. To solve this impending problem I needed to generate a significant increase in income over a short period of time. The solution was a unique, one-off arrangement whereby I persuaded Amoco, BP and Mobil to enter into ‘front-end loaded contracts’, which graduated their payments over a number of years. I was completely up front about it with them – I’m short of cash to buy the new helicopters we need to give you the level of service and availability you need, I said, so would you be prepared to pay us on a schedule whereby the first-year rates are higher than they have been, but payments taper to the point where you’re paying very little in the final year? And they went for it. They could read the situation very well, and it suited that phase of their operations. I knew them well, of course, and they had a great deal of trust in our performance. We didn’t come back and niggle because we didn’t get this or that, or something else wasn’t quite as agreed – sometimes you have to absorb the bumps, and if the problems were of the client’s own making you just had to live with it, even if it cost you money. But once they’d agreed to front-end loading, all of a sudden my cash position became so strong that I was able to order S61s on spec, thereby denying British Airways access to the Sikorsky production line and helping to push them into buying the Boeing Vertol Chinook. At the same time, Bristow helicopters could be depreciated over three years, against the undertaking to offer our clients very low prices from the fourth year onwards. I must say, I tried it out on one or two other companies and they told me to get lost, but it meant that for a couple of years our cash flow was stupendous.
Nigeria remained our biggest profit centre, and we were working on a smaller scale in South America, Africa and Europe. I never tried to crack the Alaskan oilfields. It’s a highly seasonal operation up there, with long winter shut-downs when equipment might have to be withdrawn and redeployed. I had Phil Hunt do a survey, and it seemed that people were trapping foxes and bears half the year, then in spring they’d turn into helicopter pilots again. Operational requirements are costly and specialised; metal turns brittle in the extreme cold, oil systems must be pre-heated and maintenance becomes even more onerous and expensive. Furthermore, in the 1970s it was very much a closed shop, and the American operators had it buttoned up. It would have meant competing with companies who were happy to settle for margins of three or four per cent as long as they were working; elsewhere in the world BHL was offering a far more sophisticated Instrument Flight Rules service – IFR – able to deliver in almost any weather conditions and with correspondingly higher profit margins.
We did move into Canada with Okanagan Helicopters, a company with some healthy contracts there. The owner was John Leckie, a Cambridge Blue who’d twice been in the winning crew in the Boat Race. Leckie’s father had bought vast tracts of timber country in Canada, but John was attempting to operate independently of his father’s wealth. He bought Okanagan Helicopters from a chap called Carl Yeager, who’d started it as a crop-spraying operation in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. The company was never much more than a rich man’s toy and my research showed that it was undercapitalised. I got in touch with Leckie and asked him if he’d be interested in selling part of his company to me. Because of Canadian government ownership restrictions, no foreign company could have a majority stake in Okanagan. My plan was that Leckie would retain a major shareholding, that the company would continue to operate as Okanagan – a well-known and trusted name in its markets – and that BHL would effectively control the day-to-day running of the business.
Leckie expressed interest in the proposal so I made plans to fly to Calgary in the company jet to meet him. Bristows’ Hawker 125-700 had been bought primarily to support our operations in Nigeria, where spares and personnel could get hung up interminably in Customs when we used the airlines. Internal flights were wholly unpredictable, often full, sometimes cancelled with no reason given. Spares would get to Lagos within two days only to sit there for weeks while the company worked to get them released. With the 125 we could circumvent a lot of the bottlenecks and get urgently needed spares direct to Port Harcourt or Lagos as required. Without it, some of our Nigerian operations would hardly have been practical. The 125 had been one of Hawker’s demonstrators, and we got a very good deal on it. I had the interior redesigned so it could be used as a hospital plane, with room for a medic and a bed for any patient who needed to be evacuated. The bed came in handy for long-distance flights and meant I could get some sleep en route and arrive at my destination fresh and ready to do business. The Hawker people were a bit irritated at having to do the conversion work, but we were always looking ahead to when we would exchange the 125 for a new aircraft and they didn’t want to annoy a good customer. I regularly made trips in the 125 as far afield as Indonesia and Australia, flying in the low 30,000s of feet at up to Mach .87, almost as fast as an airliner, and I often flew the jet myself to keep my hand in. It was kept in a private hangar at Gatwick to which I could fly in five minutes in the Yellow Peril, so we could very quickly get the show on the road. En route to meet Leckie, however, our plans were thrown out from the start when the co-pilot discovered he’d left his passport at home, and we had to hang around while he went off to fetch it. Alastair Gordon, who was by then Operations Director, was not at all pleased and gave the chap hell.
Also on board were Bryan Collins, Andrew Muriel, BHL’s lawyer, and John Howard, our accountant. Neither Muriel nor Howard were keen flyers, especially in small aircraft. The co-pilot’s lapse had forced us to rearrange the schedule so it became a night flight. Somewhere near Yellowknife in the remote Canadian wastes the Captain announced that we’d lost the starboard generator, which left Howard and Muriel sweating heavily. I told the Captain to put down at the nearest major airport, which happened to be Saskatoon, to see if we could get a replacement. The temperature at Saskatoon was below zero Fahrenheit and everyone was wearing fur coats except the BHL party. In the middle of the night the plane was put in a heated hangar where the engineers diagnosed a sheared generator drive shaft, so we took taxis into town and put up at a good hotel expecting to be marooned in Saskatoon for some time while a new generator was sourced. Next morning, however, I returned to the airport to find that they’d already tracked down a generator, had it flown in and were just finishing fitting it to the aircraft. By the time our journey resumed we were a full day behind schedule, but John Leckie was unperturbed and was there to meet us when we landed in Calgary.
Leckie and I got on well from the start, despite the fact that our appraisal of his company was not very positive. I was fairly abrupt in our first meeting. ‘If you go on running like you are now,’ I told him, ‘the company will be bankrupt unless you find new finance to the tune of several million dollars. If, however, you let me come in I’ll be your knight in shining armour. I’ll give you a good price for forty-nine per cent of Okanagan, I’ll run the company for you and everybody will make some money.’
Leckie’s executives opposed the idea and he vacillated for a while. He knew that everything I said about the financial situation at Okanagan was true, but the people he had running the company didn’t want BHL to take over. We had several meetings, and over dinner on the second day I ran out of patience.
‘This is
a waste of time, John,’ I told him. ‘I’m flying back to England tomorrow. It’s a pity for both of us we couldn’t do this deal.’
Leckie made up his mind on the spot. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘We’ll fly to Ottawa.’
‘Ottawa? Why?’
‘Well, if I’m selling you forty-nine per cent we have to get government permission. It’s a big shareholding and they will have their say.’
So we spent three days in Ottawa finding the right civil servants to do the job. Ottawa is a lovely city – I’d been there during the war while the Matiana was getting a new bow in Montreal – and we finally found a lobbyist that Leckie had known from his college days. This chap was able to arrange for me to meet the Minister of Aviation, doors opened as if by magic, and after a lengthy bureaucratic procedure we were proud owners of forty-nine per cent of the equity in Okanagan Helicopters. It turned out to be a profitable union for both sides. Leckie had very little involvement in the day-to-day operation of the company and left the major decisions to me. He also became a close friend. An excellent shot, he was a welcome visitor at Baynards, and he took me as his guest to Yorkshire where Sir John Ropner had some grouse moors. We stayed at Ropner’s home, Thorp Perrow, and drove to the moors each morning. All was well until Leckie began an affair with Ropner’s wife Auriel. She divorced Ropner, and Leckie divorced his wife and bought a house in Hampstead with the intention of moving permanently to the UK, but then Auriel refused to marry him. So the grouse shooting came to an end, and the moor was sold to the Arabs. I was sad when Leckie died prematurely, keeling over in his office with a heart attack at the age of sixty. He was an outstanding individual, always as good as his word; he was also a tremendously fit fellow, not at all a candidate for heart failure. Apart from competitive rowing he was a keen and accomplished mountaineer and had conquered many Himalayan peaks including K2, the second-highest mountain in the world.
Okanagan had an excellent manager in Pat Aldous, a big Canadian ex-rugby player who stayed with us for a long time. Okanagan made its money in the timber industry and by conducting geological surveys, and one of the first contracts I was able to bring in was supporting Dome Petroleum as they built an artificial island on which to base an oil exploration project. This island was supposed to withstand the worst Arctic winter weather, but it was destroyed in a storm several years later and Dome went through a period of intense financial loss.
My experience with BHL’s only American acquisition, Sabine Offshore Services on the Gulf of Mexico, was less positive. Like Alaska, the Gulf was well covered by the American helicopter operators, but it was less seasonal than Alaska and exploration was moving further out – 100 or more miles offshore. With Bristows’ experience of operating over such distances in the North Sea, it was reasonable to expect that we had an opportunity to offer the oil companies a similar service in the Gulf. As ever, I needed to grow the company and markets were limited. Furthermore, I was under pressure from oil companies for whom BHL worked in the North Sea, including Texaco, Tennessee Gas, Mobil and Esso, to provide the same level of service in the Gulf of Mexico. With our instrument flying capability we were far better able to keep to schedule in the North Sea than the Americans were in the Gulf; as it turned out, however, they wanted the guaranteed service but they didn’t want to pay for it.
In common with Canada, America imposed strict limits on foreign ownership in the transport and shipping sector, but I already had American shareholders lined up for the right property when it became available. I was in Houston talking to oil companies when I was introduced to Marvin Dudley, who owned Sabine Offshore Services in the small town of Sabine Pass. Dudley’s company was operating a mixed fleet of Hughes 500s, Sud Aviation 360s and SA365s supplying offshore rigs, but his main asset was a dockyard just off the main shipping channel in the Sabine River, which separates Louisiana from Texas. The river could handle ships of 20,000 tonnes or more but the dockyard was losing business because Dudley couldn’t afford to have the river dredged in order to bring the heavy vessels alongside. He’d tried to get bank money for dredging but couldn’t raise the wind. His three revenue streams were the dockyard, the helicopter operations, and a transmitting and receiving mast, which earned a surprising amount of money. The dockyard operation included three 10,000-shp tugs used for manoeuvring shallow-draught barges alongside. I went with him to look over the operation. The helicopter site had well-appointed offices and a hangar with room for ten aircraft, and like the dockyard it was tidy and well looked-after. I asked Dudley if he was prepared to sell the helicopter business separately, but he would only sell Sabine Offshore Services as a package.
His price was right so I put him in touch with BHL’s lawyers and we bought the company and began trading as Bristow Offshore Helicopters Inc. Dudley retained ten per cent, and the other shareholders were Charles E Morris of Mobil Oil, author James Clavell, and Bristow Helicopters Ltd. Jimmy Clavell had an American passport, which was essential because under what was called the American Wet Bottoms Law, non-Americans could not own more than a token percentage of a ship. We took an inventory of the dockside equipment and the helicopter business and found that everything was straightforward except for the fact that Charlie and Jimmy had to own the tugs, which also had to have American captains.
I found the staff to be lackadaisical and slovenly. The pilots dressed like cowboys and had an attitude to match. There was very little leadership and no discipline. I walked into the crew flight room at 8 am to find the pilots with their feet up on the table, smoking and reading the newspaper. They didn’t take the slightest bit of notice of me.
‘Gentlemen, good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m the owner.’
Some of them looked up, one or two raised a perfunctory hand. ‘Hi.’
I addressed the nearest pilot. ‘Now you get your feet off the table there, there’s a good chap.’ He didn’t move, so I brushed his feet off with my hand. He jumped up as if to square up to me and I pushed him back down into his seat. That got their attention.
‘I want you people to know that I run a professional helicopter business. When I come into the room I expect you to stand up out of courtesy. If you want to work and fly with us, you will do what we ask you to do. I do not want to see shirt-tails hanging out, I will not have boots on the table, and you will not smoke in the crewroom until we get a fire extinguisher system put in. Is that clear?’
They didn’t like it, but next day they turned up looking significantly smarter. To run the operation I employed an American called Chuck Bond, who also happened to be married to my daughter Lynda. I also sent an accountant from Redhill to get control of the finances. Chuck Bond had American passport – his parents had emigrated from the UK when he was sixteen and before he knew where he was he’d been drafted, taught to fly a helicopter gunship and sent to Vietnam, where he did two and a half tours. He did very well to instil some discipline into the operation but he preferred living in Britain, so I sent John Odlin to take over. Odlin was a former Hunter pilot who’d come to Bristows from Fison Airwork and was one of my best operations managers.
I flew with some of the American pilots and while they were quite capable, they were slapdash. People who are ill-disciplined on the ground don’t tend to do things safely in the air, and these pilots were no exception. Their procedures were ad hoc and their en-route safety calls were often neglected. Bringing them up to Bristows’ standards was going to be hard work. None of them had ever done any instrument flying, which was fundamental to the type of operation I was planning to offer. I introduced the Bell 212 and the Sikorsky S76A, both IFR-equipped to guarantee twenty-four-hour operations in almost all weathers, and I also brought in some AS350s, which the Americans called the A-star.
They had a very able manager there called Grant Allison, six foot four, very athletic, a marine engineer by trade and a quiet but effective sort of chap. I thought he was a worthy candidate for promotion and had a long talk with him to see if he was interested in instilling some discipline i
nto the place and getting some productivity out of the labour, so we could bring the charges down. He would have primary responsibility for the dockyard and it would fall to him to get the dredgers to work. He took the job and I made him Vice President of Sabine Marine Services. He was a big physical presence and nobody argued with him, but it was the cause of endless resentment and trouble because he was black, and in Louisiana in the 1970s there were very few black men in responsible positions.
The helicopter operation was doing modestly well, flying off every day to the rigs, but they never seemed to be flying for the same people two days running. I soon discovered that corruption was a way of life in the Gulf. Whatever your contract with an oil company might stipulate, the success of your business depended on how well you took care of the rig dispatcher. If you bought his wife a new car every year and made sure he had a colour TV set at Christmas, then you could have enduring tenancy of a contract. I found this very objectionable, and I did not shrink from saying so. Every bit of business we got was through bribery of one kind or another. But that, I was told, was the way of the Gulf, and I didn’t have much choice but to go along with it.