Some good colour from the transcript of Bristow Group Q3 earnings call yesterday, not looking good for the 225:-
Bill Chiles is President and CEO of Bristow and Mark Duncan is commercial VP the questions come from a variety of 3rd parties.
<Q - James D. Crandell>: Bill, can you go into a little bit more detail on the Super Pumas suspension in the North Sea, what is your understanding of where the investigation is? When could it be lifted? And secondly, can you talk a little bit in more granularity about the impact on the financials, from losing the full contracts, still getting most of the monthly charges by bringing in other aircraft to take their place?
<A - William E. Chiles>: Yeah, let me respond to the first part of the question, then I'm going to turn it over to Mark Duncan on the second part of your question. Eurocopter has recently said that they expect operations to resume late this spring. We're all being pretty measured about that. We have to be careful what we say because we're limited to what we can say by the regulators. We are working hard. We've had several meetings with our competitors, our customers and the flying public recently, and we feel pretty confident that we'll come up with an interim way to safely fly the helicopters pending possible redesign of the shaft that's cracking. We can't say that for sure. We are confident though that if the regulators require redesign of the shaft, which could take up to a year-and-a-half, we will find a way to safely fly these helicopters through a very rigorous inspection and increased control of our health, usage and monitoring system oversight. So we're looking at probably late spring, early summer that's now what we believe, that's what's in our numbers, internal numbers. So with that, I'll let Mark Duncan respond to how the customers are reacting.
<A - Mark B. Duncan>: Yes. Jim, it's Mark. The customer situation for Bristow, this is a major impact in the North Sea and a limited impact in some of our international operations. But it is a global problem. The customers are working with us very closely and supporting our ongoing efforts both to get the helicopter back in service, as Bill described, but also to continue to support us by continuing to pay some of the MSC charges. As we bring in additional aircraft into the market to supplement the lack of EC225 capacity, the supply-demand situation in that regard is providing higher rates for those replacement aircraft and you can see that reflected in the quarter's results and that will continue to be the case as we move forward through the next two quarters probably at least. Bristow's position to bring more capacity to the market as the year progresses and the S-92 order that we made allows us to start bringing aircraft in from the middle of this year all the way through until 2014, either to supplement and backfill for 225s or actually to provide additional revenue for us because the opportunities out there are significant regardless of the 225s being suspended or otherwise, so quite a positive outlook for us.
<Q - James D. Crandell>: Okay. And Mark, just to clarify, are no operators flying Super Pumas now anywhere in the world?
<A - Mark B. Duncan>: The 225 is one version of a Super Pumas, so the other versions of Super Pumas are being flown and those are some of the aircraft that we brought back into service. The 225s are - we estimate roughly 80 aircrafts are suspended worldwide. There are 225s being flown over land by many military and governments. And in the oil and gas business, we believe there are something like 17 225s being flown in Vietnam and China under the aviation authority. They'd have chosen not to follow the UK and Norway but the CAA's have actually suspended operations. So you're actually prevented from flying. Interestingly, the oil and gas customers that we have, the majority of them
being in a group called the OGP, which is the oil and gas producers' forum, they've adopted to follow the UK and Norwegian's CAA's restrictions whatever it is in the world, wherever they are flying over water.