Company Q&A: CHC Helicopters

This month, Australian Aviation sat down with Vincent D’Rozario, the CHC Helicopters regional director for the Asia-Pacific region, to learn more about how he runs the business, his approach to safety, and adapting to ‘the new normal’ in the post-COVID environment

Q: So, tell us a bit more about CHC Helicopters, and its Australian operations.

CHC is a global helicopter services company providing passenger transfers for oil and gas industries. We also provide search and rescue (SAR) and emergency medical services (EMS). In Australia, CHC has quite a diverse portfolio of customers. We have a helicopter sharing agreement in Karratha in the Pilbara region. So that’s a sharing agreement between several clients which we’ve held for over a year now. We had worked with each of the members and facilitated sharing of aircraft and reducing costs to customers beforehand so it was a smooth transition in. With that contract, we operate four aircraft; two AW189s and two AW139s. In Broome, we fly for Shell to their Prelude Floating LNG facility. Then we’ve got our on-shore programs, which are more SAR and EMS. We have provided services to the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) contracts for over 17 years. We’ve got three Bell 412s operating on the DFES contract. We also fly for the Royal Australia Navy out of Nowra (Albatross Base), and the Royal Australian Air Force across four bases and also for their deployments as required. We provide Army with Crash Response (CRH) and Aircraft Medical Evacuation (AME) services. We’ve got nine aircraft flying in total for the Australian Defence Force, seven AW 139s and two B412s. We are the premier operator of the AW 139 in Australia, we are proud to say that we’ve just completed 40,000, flight hours in that aircraft across O&G, SAR/EMS – it’s a great milestone achieved with excellent safety and an average availability of around 95 per cent to 98 per cent, consistently. Which is no small feat, that is a huge team effort.

Q: How have you managed to foster positive business relationships with your customers for such a long period of time, with such a high level of reliability?

For us, the most important thing is our relationship with our customers, and it is key to how we go about our business. Trust is built through transparency, and most of our customers would be able to tell you that at CHC we are transparent to a fault. We share even the most benign event or happening with our customers. Where possible we also provide value added services beyond providing aircraft, flying and maintaining them; for example, we have just provided one of our clients with our Crew Resource Management (CRM) training, which got glowing reviews. We also recently invited customers along to participate in our Human Foundations course so they too can benefit from the investment that we had made in developing this important course for our own people. This culture of transparency permeates throughout the business, even within our own teams; I am regularly on the road or in town halls explaining the actual factual business information with our tribe. We want everyone in CHC to treat the business as if it is their own, so we treat them as business owners and explain to them exactly where we are and where we need to get to. So when it comes to our workforce, our tribe, this culture of transparency, trust, combined with our emphasis on reimagining all facets of the business including safety leadership, is something really unique to CHC.