by Alan Bristow
When I was being persuaded by the aviation managers of oil companies to give them the same kind of service in the Gulf that they were getting in the North Sea, I made it clear to them that to provide the same standard of service – the IFR-equipped helicopters, rated and regularly trained pilots, a twenty-four-hour paramedic service and round-the-clock availability they were used to on the North Sea – would cost money. So while our reputation was high and much was expected of us, we found ourselves having to fly by Visual Flight Rules and charge VFR rates, which produced a return of three or four per cent if you got everything right.
I had supposed that James Clavell would take very little interest in the company, being in place solely in his capacity as an American, but I was pleased to find that he wanted to come to the Board meetings and often made useful suggestions. He was already a pilot, and he was very tax-aware and au fait with the ways of the Internal Revenue Service. More than that, he accompanied me on my rounds of the oil companies as I tried to persuade them that a sophisticated IFR service had to be paid for, and he made a very impressive case for it. ‘You’ve asked Mr Bristow to do all these things,’ he would say. ‘Why then can’t you pay a proper rate?’
‘Well,’ the aviation managers would say, ‘we can get the same service from these other guys who are charging the VFR rate.’
‘But they’re only flying fifty miles offshore. You’re asking Mr Bristow to fly beyond 100 miles to the new drilling positions.’
His presence tended to soften the interview, but it didn’t produce real results. The oilmen would sympathise and make vague promises, but there seemed to be no possibility that any of them would tell the dispatchers to pay us a proper rate. So many decisions were devolved down to local offices and ultimately the rig dispatchers, who were to say the least ruthless in seeking bribes. A big bald head would pop up in the office saying, ‘Aw, gee, my wife’s car is getting a little tired you know, it would be nice if I could give her a present with Christmas coming up ...’ It was the crudest type of approach – just ‘give me some money’. Eventually I had to accept we were never going to get a proper rate for the job and the money we had invested would be more productive elsewhere, so I arranged to wind up the operation. Aerospatiale bought back all the Squirrels I’d brought in and I sold the Bells to local companies and transferred out the Sikorsky S76s. I’d upgraded the heliport with offices, underground refuelling and a bigger hangar and a lot of people wanted to buy it, but we owned the freehold and rented it to several different operators, and down the years it produced a very nice income. Some months later when everything was done and dusted, our aircraft were sold and our people were out, I asked my chief accountant John Howard to work out exactly how we’d done out of Sabine Offshore Services, and he established that we’d made a paltry profit of $1,320,000, which in no way justified the assets we’d deployed and the effort we’d put into it.
I almost took on another American company – Petroleum Helicopters Inc, whose owner Bob Suggs had been a friend since our early days in Bolivia, when we’d co-operated on contracts. After I had left BHL Suggs came to see me in Cranleigh on his way home from the Paris Air Show with his wife Carol, and it was agreed between us that I would buy forty-nine per cent of PHI. Suggs looked tired and ill. At the time both PHI and BHL were planning to bid for the same contract in Colombia and it would have been advantageous to get together. Papers were drawn up, Heads of Agreement signed, and a fortnight later Suggs was dead of a heart attack. PHI made small margins; Bob was an astute and successful buyer and seller of helicopters, and most of PHI’s profits came from his dealing in that market. They had a management structure that was hopelessly top heavy, and Dookie Bayon, an ex-banker who was Suggs’ partner, didn’t really give a damn about the company. He did the dirty on Carol Suggs after Bob died by putting his shares on the market instead of offering them to Carol, and she almost lost control of the company. I got involved as her personal adviser in the mid-1980s, and she was able to get rid of a lot of the highly paid sinecures that were dragging the company down. PHI is still thriving today albeit under new ownership – Carol sold out in 2001, just before 9/11, which was excellent timing!
CHAPTER 19
Chinooks and Tigers
I’m sure Tony Cayzer imagined he was running Bristow Helicopters. He would telephone me almost every morning to ask about this operational matter or that; I was unfailingly polite to him but he was an unwelcome distraction. I thought he should have been a company gentleman, minding his estates and coming in for Board meetings at which he should vote whichever way he was told to vote by his cousin Nick, who was the business genius in the family. Tony’s contributions were rarely helpful, and they were never less welcome than when he took a close interest in the huge tandem-rotor Chinook helicopter, which we had been evaluating for use on the North Sea. It was well known that British Airways Helicopters was courting Boeing Vertol, makers of the Chinook, with a view to ordering five, and Tony Cayzer was desperate for us to follow suit. His request was passionate rather than reasoned. ‘If it’s good enough for British Airways, it should be good enough for us,’ he said to the Board.
‘I want that minuted,’ I said. Tony withdrew the remark.
The Chinook might have been good enough for British Airways, but it was a long way from being good enough for Bristow Helicopters. It had enormous load-carrying capacity but it also had many drawbacks. Some might be overcome, I thought, others seemed more intractable. Boardroom relations became ever more strained. Tony’s argument was simple – if we didn’t match BA with the Chinook we were going to be left behind. In the end I threatened to quit.
‘Come on, Alan,’ said Nick. ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘If you buy Chinooks, it’ll be with another chief executive.’
‘Let’s talk about it later,’ he said.
In his office afterwards I set out my reservations. Despite Boeing’s attempts to ‘civilianise’ the Chinook as the Boeing Model 234 it was still a military helicopter with military maintenance requirements and costs. It was too big for many North Sea applications, it wasn’t cost-effective and the case for it hadn’t been made.
‘You buy what you think is best for the company,’ said Nick. ‘I’ll talk to Tony. But he’s not the only one who’s surprised at your stance.’
Apart from pressure from the Board, Shell made it clear they were keen on having the Chinook on the North Sea, and I was being given a high-pressure sales pitch by Boeing Vertol, the Chinook’s makers. ‘British Airways will get ahead of you,’ they said. ‘Why not join the club?’ All my reservations could be dealt with, they promised. On the strength of that promise, I made a provisional order for five Chinooks and flew to the Boeing factory in Philadelphia to study the helicopter in detail. If we went through with the purchase, it was going to cost us $55 million. I took with me Bill Mayhew, Bryan Collins and our young lawyer, Andrew Muriel.
It certainly was an impressive machine. It stood nineteen feet high at the rear rotor hub, the blades spanned sixty feet and the whole helicopter was 100 feet long. It had two Lycoming T55 engines each making 3,750 hp and its maximum speed was 142 knots. Range was good – it was the only helicopter that could fly the 250 miles from Aberdeen to the Brent Field carrying a full payload and sufficient fuel to return – and it could carry forty-four men. I flew the Chinook several times and it handled very well, no problems there. But while the Boeing salesmen ran proudly through the figures, my reservations grew. The Chinook was too big to land on several of the Brent platforms, and it was more cost-effective to transfer Brent-bound passengers from Aberdeen to Sumburgh in Shetland by fixed-wing aircraft, then take them on by helicopter – that way you spent as little time as possible over water in a helicopter. And what happened if one of your Chinooks had a technical problem? With the Puma, you could simply run another helicopter twice, but your schedule would be too tight with the Chinook. Always nagging at the back of my mind was the safety argument. What if a Chino
ok went down? We had no other helicopter capable of rescuing forty-four passengers. Would we be putting too many eggs in one basket? I thought twenty passengers should be a maximum for one helicopter if we were to have a fighting chance of rescuing everyone.
Boeing had an enormous amount of in-service information on the Chinook, but most of it related to US military operations. The military were quite happy to fly a helicopter for one or two hours a day and spend the rest of the time intensively maintaining it; in civil life it would have to fly for ten hours a day and the maintenance had to be cost-effective. The maintenance costs on the Chinook would have been excessive. Boeing were relatively free with information, but it took us a long time to get a full catalogue of the TBOs on the helicopter. Every critical component on a helicopter has a TBO – time between overhaul – on which the maintenance schedule is based. The TBOs on the Chinook’s two engines, five gearboxes, six rotor blades and other specified parts were low compared to those of the Sikorsky S61 and the Puma. Boeing didn’t seem to have a comprehensive record of in-service maintenance, but eventually we managed to get figures for a complete aircraft and they showed that only thirty-six per cent of these components were actually reaching their already-low TBOs – the rest didn’t even last that long. Unless there were major improvements, it would obviously be far cheaper to fly two S61s in place of one Chinook. Boeing were promising better TBOs, but where were the guarantees? I insisted that if we bought the Chinook, Boeing would have to underwrite the TBOs so that a failure to reach them would hit them in the pocket.
But the clincher was the lack of a two-and-a-half-minute rating on the engines. There was a safety requirement that if one engine failed during take-off from an offshore platform, the second engine could be boosted to maximum power and had to be guaranteed to carry the full load of the helicopter without failing for two and a half minutes, in order to allow the pilot to accelerate to a safe ‘stay-up’ speed. In a helicopter the size and weight of the Chinook this put enormous strain on the surviving engine, and Lycoming candidly admitted it could not be guaranteed to operate at the highest power setting for the specified length of time. At the beginning of our negotiations they indicated that the rating might be achievable with modifications, but towards the end of the week we spent at Boeing Vertol in Philadelphia the Lycoming people made an honest statement that they didn’t ever expect to be able to reach the two-and-a-half-minute rating in the life of this particular type of Chinook, and they would be looking at a completely new engine.
I don’t know how British Airways got around that problem. Perhaps their relationship with the CAA was better than mine. Bristow Helicopters had effectively written the operational rules for flying on the North Sea, and the two-and-a-half minute rating was enshrined in them. The Air Registration Board, forerunner of the Civil Aviation Authority, had no one with helicopter experience and could contribute little to the debate. I insisted that twin-engined helicopters had to be used, and established most of the weather minima that were laid down in the regulations. Not only was I able to influence the regulations through the British Helicopter Advisory Board but I was the independent airlines’ representative to the Air Registration Board, so I was very difficult to ignore. I was on good personal terms with Jock Cameron, who was running British Airways Helicopters. Jock had taken over from Reggie Brie, who’d been Cierva’s test pilot before the war and had been an instructor at Floyd Bennett Field in New York when I was there. As far as the public were concerned Jock and I were at each other’s throats every minute of the day, but in private we shared information and adopted a common approach to problems. We had made a joint representation to the RAF, who were providing our air traffic control out over the North Sea, when we thought there was insufficient separation between aircraft in areas beyond radar cover, and several times we resolved problems informally between us. Jock didn’t have much of a social side, but he’d been a damned good pilot and we got on well. During the period when we couldn’t get S61Ns from Sikorsky, we agreed to order five Sea Kings each from Westlands. The Sea King was the Westland-built version of the S61 and we thought an order for ten would encourage Westland to civil-certify the aircraft, or at least allow us to do so, as we had with the S55. In the event, Westlands refused the order saying they were too busy with military contracts and the Ministry of Defence wouldn’t allow it – an indication of just how little get-up-and-go there was in the company. But the attempt to do a deal showed the extent to which BA and Bristows could co-operate when our interests coincided.
I discussed the Chinook with Jock, but I did not seek to dissuade him from buying. He had been heartened when Bristows made its provisional order for five Chinooks – I think that must have confirmed in his own mind that the helicopter was viable on the North Sea. We evaluated the aircraft separately, and I think he got carried away with the rather simple idea that if you got an aircraft that could carry forty-four people all the way from Aberdeen to the Brent, you ought to use it. I laughed when I heard he’d confirmed an order for five Chinooks – not only would it put him at a competitive disadvantage, but it would leave the way clear for Bristows to get a better deal on helicopters we were really interested in like the S61N and the upgraded Puma. My executive Board – George Fry, Alastair Gordon and Jack Woolley – were with me; it was the shareholder Board members who were difficult to convince.
I cancelled Bristows’ provisional order for the Chinooks. It wasn’t, of course, as clear-cut as that at the time. Had the Chinook worked, had it had the reliability, had the maintenance costs been brought down as Boeing was indicating, had there been a rescue service in place capable of dealing with forty-four people, I might well have been shot out of the sky. But my system of fixed-wing flights into Sumburgh and onward flights in helicopters with shorter range was sound, conservative, and economically more attractive. The Chinooks caused endless trouble and expense for British Airways, so much so that they were a significant factor in BA’s decision to get out of the North Sea helicopter business. BA lost their first Chinook in 1984 when it suffered control problems in the East Shetland basin near the Cormorant Alpha platform. The pilots did extremely well to put the helicopter down undamaged – had they delayed it would quickly have suffered a catastrophic failure – but it eventually turned turtle and was written off. Thanks to the calm state of the sea and the presence of boats nearby all forty-four passengers, two pilots and a cabin attendant were rescued. Two years later they were not so lucky. A gearbox failure on approach to Sumburgh caused the rotors to collide and the Chinook went down with the loss of forty-three people. By that time the company had been sold to Robert Maxwell and had been renamed British International Helicopters. The oil companies decided from that day on they would place no more personnel on board a Chinook, so its short life as a North Sea transport came to an end.
Tony Cayzer never mentioned the Chinook again after I cancelled the provisional order. He never held grudges, and if he was put down at a Board meeting he would bounce back the following day as though nothing had happened. I told Nick he ought to find a proper job for him, and Nick put him in charge of Servisair, one of the Air Holdings companies Freddie Laker had bought at Gatwick. To everyone’s surprise Tony made a splendid job of it, returning Servisair to profitability while simultaneously staying out of my hair.
For all practical purposes, the choice of helicopters was mine alone. In the early days there was little to choose from; the only company that would give me terms was Westland Helicopters, so we flew Widgeons and Whirlwinds. For the Shell contract in Bolivia it was specified that we use the Bell 47G2, and later when we took over from Fison Airwork we inherited their mixture of Hillers and Bells. While Westland was prepared to give us lease purchase facilities, we didn’t always use them; George and I thought that as long as we could buy helicopters with cash, it was bad business to go borrowing money. Decisions were partly driven by what I called the ‘fashion parade’. The oil companies had to be offered the latest helicopters with the most sophist
icated new equipment. It was no use trying to sell them old Whirlwinds and Widgeons when there was something sleeker available. No matter how capable your old machine, sooner or later it would start to look dowdy in the eyes of the customer, so upgrades were necessary from the point of view of perceptions as much as for operational reasons.
We were always faced with the problem of buying in anticipation of demand perhaps ten years down the line. With support from Nick Cayzer and the Board I was always able to buy ahead of the market, so that whenever contracts came up at short notice we had the equipment to be able to bid. For our North Sea operations in the mid-1960s I chose the Wessex 60, a Westland-built Sikorsky design that could take fourteen passengers and had good single-engine performance. The pilots liked the Wessex, as did the oil companies, and it served us well. It started operations to the gas rigs out of North Denes and moved north as the oil industry opened up in Aberdeen, but the distances to the oil fields were much greater, and we needed something with longer legs. Range was a problem with the Wessex; we found that the only way to get them across the Timor Sea to Australia was to shut down one engine and cruise on the other. Alastair Gordon and I flew a Wessex on that sector, and the only way to stay safe was to climb to 10,000 feet before shutting down an engine. That way, if the working engine failed you’d probably have enough time to get the other one up and running before you hit the water. Later we built a concrete platform on a coral atoll to service operations for Woodside Petroleum in the Timor Sea, and it worked well when the native fishermen didn’t tap the fuel barrels. We tried putting extra fuel tanks in the Wessex but it meant we couldn’t carry as many passengers. I always preferred the Sikorsky S61N, but by the time BHL had the work to justify their purchase, they were very difficult to get hold of; Sikorsky was stretched to the limit in the late 1960s trying to fulfil orders. British Airways Helicopters – then operating under the name of BEA – had bought two S61s as early as 1963, when they simply didn’t have enough work for them. They put one on the route from Penzance to the Scilly Isles, and the other was kept for ‘research and development’ and sat on the ground at Gatwick. Backed by the bottomless pockets of the taxpayer BA could afford to make such quixotic moves, but to a private company like BHL the S61 seemed hellishly expensive compared with the Wessex, and we didn’t have the passenger numbers to justify the purchase. The situation changed radically over the next five years as demand for capacity on the North Sea grew at a rate we could barely keep pace with. BEA bought more S61s for the North Sea, and we were left scratching around for similar equipment with which to remain competitive.