CHC win Super Puma contract in Angola. CHC expansion - good or bad?

[Heliport]

ST. JOHN'S, Newfoundland

CHC has been awarded a new contract in West Africa for the provision of one Super Puma AS332L2 for a period of initially 18 months commencing immediately.
Anticipated revenue over the term of the contract is approximately CDN $11 million.
CHC will lease the advanced Super Puma MkII to Sonair, the aeronautical subsidiary of the Angolan national oil company Sonangol.
The helicopter will be based at Luanda, Angola.


Last week, CHC announced a profit of $25.4 million for the quarter ended April 30. Revenue for the quarter was $218.4 million compared with $174.6 million last year, boosted by its acquisition last December of the Netherlands-based Schreiner Aviation Group which serves the offshore oil and gas industry in Europe, Africa and Asia.
.
Total flying hours increased to 37,856, from 30,497.

CHC says it is now the world's largest provider of heavy and medium helicopter services to the global offshore oil and gas industry, with aircraft operating in 30 countries and about 3,500 employees worldwide.

For the year ended April 30, CHC posted a profit of $63.7 million.

[PaperworkPilot]

So what's next for the hummingbirders. Come on, lets hear the rumours.

[Mama Mangrove]

For anyone who's been taken over by them it's, more job cuts, more pay cuts, more loss of privileges and perks and more work in general for less reward. :yuk:

[Phone Wind]

Talk to most of the guys (and girls) employed in companies taken over by CHC and I'm sure you'll find that as employees they think that it's had an adverse affect on them.

Mama Mangrove is right, it normally leads to job cuts and more work for less reward. My own company used to be a decent one to work for and the management knew most of the pilots. Since the CHC take over we've all just become numbers in the great bean counters' number-bag. Companies used to be run by the guys, now long-gone, unfortunately, who started them. The days of the Alan Bristows and Bobb Suggs of this world have gone and companies are being run by faceless bureaucrats who's only concern is the last line on the balance sheet. CHC accounting practices mean that we have to produce a huge number of figures every month, based on actual and forecast revenues. They then just use these to publish lots of numbers like those quoted in the report by Heliport, to impress investors. To their management we employees are just part of a huge stockmarket game. For them it's fun, for us it's frightening because they're playing with our jobs, our futures and our lives. :ugh:

The revenue they can raise may mean that they can modernise their helicopter fleet, but that's the only progress being made. For we employees it's a step back. For the guys in companies taken over in places like Europe, the impact is often less, because those countries have laws for the protection of employees and there are usually strong unions in place to fight for employees rights. The usual impact is that of the nevitable job losses. For those of us working in, or coming from, third world countries, there is little or no protection and when a predator like CHC takes over we just have to wait and see what sort of deterioration we are going to suffer in our lives - or leave. My company was a good, profitable one, with mostly happy pilots, but now, whilst we're still profitable, many of us are looking elsewhere bacause our conditions are being degraded every month it seems.:*

[cpt]

You are right Phone Wind, but you see, the predators have spread everywhere....not only in big companies....Smaller ones are also infected,by this kind of managment where under cover of ridicoulous HSE policies employees are treated in the greatest disdain. I think the time of "nice" companies has simply gone with this surge of too soon coming so called "liberalism" wich is turning into chaos and anarchy.
Our managers are not "aviators" anymore but greedy impostors.
They have taken over, purely for profit, it could have been anything else than an helicopter company.
I wonder wether this mixture will last long...and what the future will look like.
At least; even as contract pilots we are still winding up our rotors and the sky is still the same to us.
Only sky above (and there is a lot of sky above us on route bravo at FL45)


:hmm: