Originally Posted by
rotor-rooter
I think you may have this backwards? The Helicopter Operators got bigger and bolder and Offshore Helicopters became a boom business, with every carpet-bagging chancer showing up to slurp from the trough. Managing the companies, changing financial strategies, cashing out of equity, leasing everything, it all changed in the last decade. Then you need to look at the management personnel themselves - we already know the behaviours of the "leaders" who enriched themselves, hired their friends and then ran each of these companies into the ground (Quote. "They should be hung drawn and quartered to pay for their bullish, arrogant and frankly disgusting behaviour"). So which company should we consider first? CHC, PHI, Bristow, Era or Babcock as the big ones that made the biggest splash. The beneficial owners of the helicopter companies did this to themselves. They appointed people with zero knowledge, experience or interest in helicopters, then wondered why it didn't work out? And then the unthinkable happened, the bottom fell out of the oil market, (which for some of the more senior people in the industry, wasn't a first), and the entire house of cards collapsed. Manufacturers, Leasing outfits, Operators and anyone remotely involved in the offshore field watched it all fall apart.
So quite how this can be laid at the feet of the Oil Companies, doesn't compute with me. It is always easiest to blame your Customers, but if they can't pay your rates, they'll look elsewhere. And guess what? Another helicopter company is ALWAYS prepared to do the work for less money - market forces at work. You can either keep flying, or shut the doors, and we have all seen what happened as a result. The only people who won were the incompetent Boards and Managements that allowed this situation to foment, grossly enriching themselves in the process, and the losers were anyone unfortunate enough to own stock in these companies, who saw their entire investment wiped out completely, and the employees that actually make the company run and generate the revenue, who ended up unemployed.