Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  ‘Come and see your new aircraft,’ he said.

  When we landed at Marignane in the 125, Legrand had pulled a smart trick – he had parked an old Puma 330J right beside the new Super Puma. It was like looking at a 707 next to a 747, it was so much bigger in profile. I was impressed.

  ‘This is the flying prototype of the aircraft we have built to your specifications,’ François Legrand said proudly.

  I went for a test flight with Aerospatiale’s chief test pilot Jean Boulet, whom I’d known since we test-flew the German Focke-Achgelis Fa223 helicopter after the war. During a seventy-minute wring-out I flew out to 150 knots, at which speed the helicopter really started to shake. At up to 135 knots it was very comfortable, and I envisaged an operational cruise speed of 140 knots.

  As is the way in France, I was invited to a long and relaxed lunch with all of Aerospatiale’s senior men. Sitting between François Legrand and Jean Boulet, I ate my Dover sole, drank my white wine, talked about old times flying helicopters in France, and thought about the Super Puma. It was an excellent helicopter, conforming closely to our specification, and it could out-perform anything else in the industry. I knew the oil companies would like it. Operating costs were relatively low. When the question came, I was ready for it.

  ‘The helicopter suits your requirements, no?’ asked François.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is a very good helicopter that will fit into our fleet very well.’

  ‘How many would you like?’

  ‘I’ll take thirty-five.’

  There was a dead silence around the table. In his wildest dreams François might have thought he could sell me ten.

  ‘Surely you are joking with me,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want thirty-five. But there are conditions. First, you can sell none of these helicopters to anyone else until you have fulfilled my order.’

  François shrugged. ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Secondly, I want a ten per cent discount on the spares.’

  ‘Possible,’ said François.

  ‘Thirdly, I want you to buy ten S61s from me.’ By that time Bristows had been operating the S61 for a decade and it was far down the ‘fashion parade’ and starting to get very expensive to maintain. The CAA didn’t like its poor single-engined performance and was trying to pressure us into reducing payload to meet its criteria. They were making Alastair Gordon’s life miserable, largely I believe because of a grudge held by their test pilot, Peter Harper, against Bristow Helicopters. Jack Woolley, Alastair and Phil Hunt, whose job it was to keep tabs on the comparative performance of all helicopters, new and old, put together a dossier showing that we’d flown tens of thousands of hours on more than twenty S61Ns without an engine problem at all, and that slowed the CAA down a bit. But the Super Puma would solve all these problems.

  Once again there was silence around the Aerospatiale lunch table. Finally François spoke. ‘I don’t think we can do that,’ he said.

  ‘Look, the only way you’ll sell the Super Puma helicopter in foreign markets is if you have a lead order, and that’s me,’ I said. ‘I’ll operate them on the North Sea, in Malaysia, in Canada, I’ll take all the risks of operating a totally new type, and in return you buy my S61s at a set price. “New lamps for old”, that’s what we’ll call it.’

  ‘But we have no use for S61s,’ he muttered.

  ‘There’s always a market for these helicopters,’ I said. ‘You can sell them on through an agent or a third party to dissociate Aerospatiale from selling a Sikorsky product. But you’ve got the marketing men out there, you’re dealing with third world countries, you can sell these helicopters. It’s “new lamps for old”, or we can’t do the deal.’

  The prospect of losing an order for thirty-five Super Pumas concentrated François Legrand’s mind. ‘Okay,’ he said slowly. ‘Let us look at the details.’

  Once again the conversation picked up. ‘What work does Bristows have lined up for thirty-five new helicopters?’ François asked Alastair Gordon.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alastair said. ‘Better ask Alan.’

  François turned to me with an inquiring look.

  ‘We’re going to take them into inventory,’ I said. For the third time, a dead silence fell on the table. But I knew, as did Alastair, that if we got the Super Puma right it would become the mainstay of our fleet across the world. It was the best thing on the market, and if I hadn’t seized it then, someone else would have done. Industry expansion was at its greatest point at that time, particularly on the North Sea, and there was no shortage of work for them. It had a greater range than anything else available.

  When it came round to the coffee, I told François to raise a pro-forma invoice and a comprehensive specification for the Bristow Super Puma.

  ‘What should we call it?’ he asked. ‘You are ordering so many that you should have the privilege of naming the helicopter.’ Seeing my blank face, he added: ‘How about the Bristow Tiger?’

  ‘That sounds perfect to me,’ I said.

  We bid our farewells and returned home. Before we went to bed that night, we faxed them a confirmation of the order for thirty-five helicopters, subject to the conditions that they couldn’t sell the aircraft to anyone else, and that they agreed to take back ten S61 helicopters from us at an agreed price of $1.8 million each, provided their components were at least half-life. The whole package came to something like £70 million, and it was a very good deal.

  Next day I had to organise a team of Bristow’s mento go to Marignane to ensure that all of our specifications were incorporated into the Bristow Tiger. I called in Jean Dennel, the Head of Engineering at Redhill, and asked him to lead the team. Jean was not happy. He thought he was being demoted to Project Engineer.

  ‘No, this is a promotion for you,’ I told him. ‘This is the biggest order we’ve ever had. Besides, there’s no one better to lead this team – I’m sending a Frenchman to fight the French!’ Jean became wholeheartedly committed to making the project work and was always something of a thorn in Aerospatiale’s side. But we were gambling with a new helicopter that had never been in service, and I needed a man like him to be in there fighting our corner. Fortunately we had a staggered programme, accepting the aircraft in small numbers. In-service problems were not as bad as they could have been, although there were a number of serious deficiencies that had to be remedied, and both Jean and I had some epic shouting matches with Aerospatiale. But we got what we wanted.

  Aerospatiale faithfully fulfilled their part of the bargain. Once the teething problems had been ironed out they had buyers clamouring for the Super Puma, but they discharged their commitment to manufacture thirty-five for us before selling a single one to anyone else. That was about two years’ production, and a number of other operators were forced to settle for lesser helicopters because we had cornered the market, which gave us a further competitive advantage. Aerospatiale also took all the S61s that we sent them at a fixed price of $1.8 million each. Effectively I had a ‘put’ option on the S61, and while I could have sent them ten helicopters, we were expanding so fast around the world that I only ever sent six. But ‘new lamps for old’ saved us a great deal of time and trouble in selling on used helicopters.

  On the day of our formal acceptance I flew down to Marseilles. I walked into a hangar and found, to my horror, a crowd of Bristow’s people.

  ‘How the hell did you all get here?’ I shouted. Aerospatiale had gathered several hundred people for a formal presentation and they were all dressed up to the nines, while I was only dressed in a silk cravat with an open-necked shirt and baseball cap. There in front of me was the first Bristow Tiger, cleaned and polished and on a plinth.

  ‘You’ll have to say a few words,’ said François Legrand.

  ‘You bastard, you gave me no warning of this,’ I said.

  ‘We have to have a little ceremony,’ he shrugged. ‘This is a great day for Aerospatiale, too.’

  François made a speech in French. He laid it on thi
ck, saying what a wonderful company Bristows was – fortunately most of my staff couldn’t understand. Then he turned to me and handed me the keys to the helicopter. I went blank. My brain was completely numb and I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I stood up, took the keys from him and said:

  ‘C’est la clef la plus che`re du monde!’

  It wasn’t a very good time to borrow money, but we obtained finance from the French export credit guarantee bank, the Compagnie Francaise d’Assurance pour le Commerce Exterieur, which never exceeded six per cent. Aerospatiale eventually went on to sell more than 1,000 Super Pumas to civil operators and air forces around the world, and twenty-five years on the type is still in service with Bristow Helicopters.

  Bristows were also the lead customers on the Sikorsky S76, a helicopter that was well ahead of its time. I was invited to America to fly the 76 with Sikorsky’s test pilot, a chap called Nick Lappos with whom I got on very well. I was never happy with one aspect of it, and that was the degree to which you had to raise the nose to flare prior to landing. If you’re landing on offshore platforms you need as much forward visibility as possible at that critical phase of flight. I told Lappos on our first flight that they’d have to enlarge the Perspex panels in the chin to improve visibility, and when I got back to the factory the very next day they’d already done the job! It was a good helicopter and when I left Sikorsky after a week I told them they would be getting an order for fourteen. I was more interested in the maintenance side and the logistic support than I was in the flying. I could assimilate and judge the flying qualities very quickly – apart from the nasty little business of the nose coming up in the flare, its single-engine performance was adequate and its autorotative qualities were very good. It was not very popular with my chaps offshore at the beginning, until they got used to it. They developed their own technique for it, in which they approached alongside the rig and translated onto the deck sideways. The early S76s came with Allison 250 C30 engines, and they proved to be far from reliable. In fact, they failed so often and so violently that we had to encase them in a titanium shield to try to keep stray turbine blades out of the cabin. Eventually we modified the S76 to take Turbomeca Arriel 2S1 engines, which performed flawlessly and turned a good helicopter into a great one.

  We have experienced accidents with every type we have flown, but far fewer than most people expected when we began to exploit the North Sea. Every accident comes as a body blow to everyone in the company, but you just have to get on with it. We stopped at nothing to prevent accidents; we began discussing HUMS, the Health and Usage Monitoring System, as far back as the 1970s. This was a ‘central nervous system’ for a helicopter that monitored every possible parameter so that the engineers on the ground could get prior warning of excessive stress and possible failure. In the early days, if a chap was jogging along and he got a warning light, in the absence of any other symptoms he’d just write it up when he got to the rig and the engineers would look at it later. Given the technology of the time there were a lot of spurious alerts. But I thought there had to be a way of telling the pilot whether what was going on there and then was potentially catastrophic or not. If you’re sixty miles offshore and the temperature in the gearbox is rising, you would need to establish how long you had left before you’d have to ditch. I tasked Alastair Gordon to research the possibilities, and he went around the world finding contractors who could contribute the parts we needed. Alastair was made chairman of the Helicopter Airworthiness Review Panel, a joint CAA and industry body that looked at every aspect of safety. Eventually, built-in HUMS became standard and helicopter operations were much safer for it.

  But in the 1970s we didn’t even have workable flight data recorders for helicopters like the Wessex – and while accidents were bad, unexplained accidents were far worse. We’d been operating the Wessex 60 since the mid-1960s when there were very few twin-engined helicopters available to us, but the Americans were very shy of it – they would have preferred something made in the good old US of A. The Wessex had more power than anything else, which made it expensive to run. We lost one when we were working for Shell in Malaysia with an azimuth control failure – one of the pitch links that control the angle of attack of the main rotor blades sheared, which one might expect would render the helicopter uncontrollable. The pilot, John Waddington, managed to save all bar one of the fourteen people on board with consummate flying skill, using the collective to damp out phugoids as they descended into the South China Sea. How on earth he managed to pull it off I’ll never know. I promoted him in recognition of his extraordinary skill; he should have got an award for it. He ditched the Wessex at about twenty knots, softly enough for everyone to get out, but one of the passengers, a Chinaman, was so terrified that he refused to undo his seatbelt and evacuate. They found him when they raised the wreckage, still strapped in his seat.

  We had two more accidents, including a double engine failure in Nigeria, but the end of the Wessex came very suddenly and tragically. In August 1981, on Friday 13th, we lost a Wessex 60 off the Norfolk coast, and to this day we do not know why the accident happened. It was coming back from a rig in the Leman Bank gas field when it suffered a complete double engine failure. The pilot, Ben Breech, put out a Mayday and prepared to autorotate onto the water, but in the late stages of the descent control was somehow lost and the aircraft crashed, killing thirteen people.

  I remember that as a particularly harrowing time because Ben Breech was a personal friend – I’d been staying with him just a couple of weeks before the accident. He was a highly skilled pilot with 5,000 hours on the Wessex 60 alone, and I was determined to establish why he and the others had died. We had a world of difficulty trying to recover the wreck. We sent a salvage vessel called the British Enterprise II with a team of divers, and another ship, the Gardline Locator, with underwater search equipment. We found the helicopter within a day and raised the gearbox and rotor head, but a storm blew up and the conditions became horrendous. The sandbanks on the seabed were constantly shifting and the wreckage was disappearing under mounds of sediment. I spent half a million pounds trying to raise it, and Westlands and Rolls-Royce refused to help until the Air Accidents Investigation Branch persuaded them to make a contribution. Vast amounts of this awful liquid silt were dredged from the sea bed, but no sooner had they made an impression than it would fill with silt again. The salvage effort continued off and on between storms until November, when they finally gave up. They’d brought up some instruments and other small items, but the salvage experts said there was no chance of recovering any more. We’d had six ships and sixteen divers working in appalling conditions for weeks, and it was immensely frustrating to recover so little. The AAIB sifted through the evidence and the wreckage for years, but eventually admitted defeat – they couldn’t even begin to establish why the engines had failed, or why control had been lost.

  I made an instant decision on the day of the accident to get the Wessex out of the air and grounded the whole fleet. It was a bloody expensive decision but I wasn’t prepared to tolerate accidents that couldn’t be explained. I couldn’t conceal my distress in the days following the deaths of Ben Breech and his passengers. I had a number of heated conversations with Sir Basil Blackwell, who was group chief executive of Westlands at the time. Basil agreed to take back all Bristow Helicopters Wessex 60s, and we shuffled our other equipment to cover the gaps as far as possible. Soon afterwards we ensured that all our helicopters had Cockpit Voice Recorders and Flight Data Recorders. But the frustration of not knowing how an accident happened, of being unable to do anything to ensure that it did not recur, lives with me to this day. Helicopters could be the best business in the world, if it wasn’t for the accidents.

  CHAPTER 20

  Aberdeen Strike

  I thought that my hands-on management style and the high calibre of the men I’d appointed to run the Aberdeen operation would ensure that I knew what was going on there every minute of the day. How wrong I was. The most important inf
ormation on Aberdeen was given to me by my housekeeper, Mrs Smith, when she woke me up a few minutes after 7 am on Sunday 17 April 1977.

  ‘Bristow Helicopters is on strike,’ she said.

  ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ I said.

  ‘I heard it on the wireless. The BBC says Bristow Helicopters pilots have gone on strike in Aberdeen.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘Well, it’s true.’

  Hell’s bells and buckets of blood! I got the duty officer at Aberdeen on the phone.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘fifty or so pilots are out on strike.’

  As I struggled into my clothes I arranged to borrow Charles Forte’s private jet and asked the pilots to make ready for a flight to Aberdeen. Then I called George Fry.

  ‘We’ve got a pilots’ strike at Aberdeen,’ I said. ‘We’d better get up there right away.’

  The strike came as a shock, but I wasn’t wholly unprepared for it. I’ve always made a point of thinking the unthinkable, and planning for it. As events were to prove, the timely action I had put in place at Aberdeen was to get us over one of the most serious threats the company had faced.

  By late morning the jet was approaching Dyce Airport and the Captain radioed Aberdeen Air Traffic Control for joining instructions. The radio exchange went on longer than usual. In the back, I could only hear one side of the transmissions.