Crazi
sorry my sarcasm didn't come across. I am well aware of the risk to business continuity, however it hasn't changed the fact loss making contracts are still being awarded.
IOCs don't have insight into all of a helicopter operators' costs. When selecting a successful tenderer, providing bids meet the safety and technical requirements, its natural that an IOC will select the lowest cost option from the submitted responses.
It seems to be a popular view that oil companies are always villainous in selecting the most competitive tender and should somehow volunteer to pay helicopter companies extra to compensate for their own poor business decisions.
Much of the current industry malaise among helicopter companies is as a result of their taking advantage of aircraft lease deals which appeared cheap at the time with little or no thought as to what may happen if there was an industry downturn. So large was the capacity increase caused by abundant lease deals that when the downturn came, even the grounding of the complete 225 offshore fleet didn't cause a shortage of aircraft.