Several things to address here:
1. Ref leasing companies, they make 14-18% per ac depending on who they lease them to, if they can;t make money on them at that rate I will curl up and laugh. They have billions of dollars of assets and billions of dollars at low rates owing to the credit quality of their owners (ie low interest rates). A few idle new S92s/ 225s when you just financed BA's new A380 fleet is a drop in the ocean.
2. When other operators are bidding 100k per ac below the rest of the bidders then there is a problem. I am perfectly happy for people to win work against CHC, it is a competitive market after all but when everyone else who bids is within about 20k of each other and someone bids 80k below that then something is wrong. Inaer is the most recent example. They also showed up in Mozambique with no GSE and tried to buy CHC's off them. Buy hey, they were very cheap.... Beyond that, TenTon I agree with everything you say.
3. Genuine qn - I'd be interested to know which contracts CHC holds which are loss making?
Lastly I really think the RW industry needs to get together and tell the oil companies that 3 month termination clauses in all contract are no longer acceptable. If you sign a contract you should honour it. This sh!t fight we are all engaged in (and CHC is not blameless in this) is not helpful and merely makes churn and huge disruption to our industry. If someone signs a 5 year contract, we should be able to stand up and hold an oil company to it.
But we won't because customer is king and they hold all the cards... it's exhausting.