To answer Mitchaa's question above about structuring it's pretty complex and all to do with tax, EU rules and Aviation regulatory oversight.
Both CHC and BRS are US listed firms with largely US ownership. This means to operate in Europe they have to have a majority EU owner which means partnering in some shape or form with an EU owned and controlled entity. CHC's partner (from memory) is the family office of a major high street clothing chain owner for example. For the record, this is extremely normal. Therefore if and when the minority shareholder goes bust, in theory the major shareholder becomes the only shareholder (for the sake of clarity, let's call them S1 for use below). That's fine at the company ownership level but the question then becomes can S1 now exercise control of an aviation business without the assistance of BRS in this case who provided the operational oversight, hiring of crew, aircraft, PBH contracts, maintenance etc? The answer is probably not, at least at first.
It gets worse of course. The aircraft for the BRS UK entity will likely be on a bareboat charter from another entity within the BRS group of companies. This means the aircraft they are flying if the parent of BRS goes bust will likely cease to be legally available to S1 as their relationship ceased to exist the moment they filed for Ch 7. S1 will therefore have no legal control
potentially of the aircraft.
Now, if the aircraft are owned it's very hard to see them taking off the day after filing for Ch 7 or the creditors pulling the plug. It's come and get the money time. Some of the aircraft might be financed by a small consortium of banks so they are secured but not against 1 owner so decision making becomes very difficult very fast. If they are leased, clearly it's in everyone's best interest to get them back off the ground again and making money but the leases need to be re-written potentially.
Now it's time to add the regulator into the picture. One of the founding principles of getting an AOC is that you have a business case to have one. Clearly BRS in it's current guise do not so the regulator could withdraw the AOC, or at least suspend it until the mess descibed above has been tidied up.
It's not beyond anyone that it gets fixed but it's not as simple as 'the UK entity is fine' owing to how the businesses are structured globally these days. Not saying it will happen for sure, but potentially it's a mess which will take weeks to fix.
NWS
and 212man - Shell with CHC 2016....
