Phoenix Rising

 

When Paul Spring flies first-time visitors over Fort McMurray, Alta., in Phoenix Heli-Flight’s distinctive helicopters, the reaction is almost always the same. Situated fairly centrally in the huge swathe of northern Alberta that sits on the Athabasca oil sands, and as a result, surrounded by dozens of multi-billion dollar mining operations, the city is going through a growth spurt reminiscent of a frontier town during the Klondike Gold Rush. But, while the smell of bitumen from the black gold may filter into the cockpit, the scene below doesn’t mesh with the pre-conceived image most seem to hold of the area. “We’ve got natural forest everywhere,”

Spring told Canadian Skies during the magazine’s recent visit to Phoenix’s operation. “They say, ‘We thought it’d be a total wasteland; entirely annihilated. Show us the destruction!’ But all it is, is small pockets of industry surrounded by forest.”

For the uninitiated, the city is full of surprises. It’s probably not one of the first places you’d think of when asked to name the hottest real estate markets in Canada (according to Royal LePage, a standard two-storey in the city sells for $747,000 – putting it not far behind Vancouver and Toronto); and for the last 20 years, the remote city has played host to one of the most innovative aviation companies in the world: Phoenix Heli-Flight. The feat is even more impressive when you consider the size of Phoenix’s fleet (seven aircraft), the nature of its operations (utility) and where it operates (the Canadian bush).

A One-man Operation
Phoenix Heli-Flight began as a partnership between Spring and a friend in 1992. Spring had moved to Fort McMurray seven years earlier to work at one of the two helicopter companies that was operating in the city (there are now seven). After serving that company as a pilot/mechanic/base manager, the step to running his own operation wasn’t a step into the complete unknown. Beginning with one used leased aircraft, the two founders worked without wages for the first year to enable the company to get off the ground. “I thought we did pretty good the first year, but unfortunately my partner didn’t have the vision to see it through,” said Spring. “So after a year and a half, he wanted to leave and I bought him out.”

Spring certainly had a vision for the company – and he knew what they needed to do to get there. “When you get into helicopters, there’s only a few different aspects where you can actually compete with the other companies,” he said. “One of them is service – but other companies can figure that out. Leading the way technology-wise with aircraft, however, is not something that all companies can do – or are willing to do. The other competitive edge is price. So if your service and aircraft are the same, then it’s price – and everybody starts price-cutting to get work. So rather than price cut, we decided to go and spend some money to get a really nice aircraft.”

The opportunity to take this step presented itself when Spring was invited to join a Eurocopter Customer Advisory Team in the south of France in 1996. The manufacturer wanted feedback on a new helicopter it was producing. “They had a flying prototype that still had plywood test surfaces attached,” he recalls. “It was pretty funny looking. . . . It was the [EC]120.” But Spring was sufficiently impressed with what he saw to order one before he’d even left the country. It would take another three and half years before it completed development and began service in Fort McMurray; but when it did arrive, it was the first in the country to be used commercially, and the first in the world to be used in the bush. In a town full of Bell aircraft, the competition for Phoenix’s 120 was the Bell 206A JetRanger. “It was a no-brainer for the customer,” said Spring. “It’s a fast, modern, quiet helicopter with good sight lines; it hauls more load [than the JetRanger] and has a huge trunk. All we had to do was get them to try it once, and that was enough.”

Phoenix had already been catching people’s attention with the flaming bird design on its aircraft, created the winter before the huge Mariana Lake wildfire in 1995, on which Phoenix worked. “After the fire was all over, there were tonnes of helicopter pictures and they were all ours,” said Spring. “You couldn’t find a picture of any other helicopter working that fire, though there were probably 30 of them. [Sikorsky] S58s, [Bell] 204s, [Bell] 212s, everything was there. But no pictures. So I said: ‘This is pretty good marketing.’ Ever since then we decided to do the Phoenix bird and get better at it as we go, get better artists, get a better paint job, and the rest is history.”

And the artists got plenty of practice over the next few years, as the arrival of the 120 heralded a period of rapid expansion at Phoenix. Another 120 was purchased within a year, and the next decade saw the Phoenix fleet expand to its current seven aircraft, including a number of notable firsts: the first Eurocopter EC130, AS355N, and AS355 NP in Canada; and the first dual hydraulic Eurocopter AS350 B3 in Canada. An AS350 B2 completes the fleet.

But, as Spring is quick to point out, there is a cost to breaking such new ground – especially with the more expensive twin-engine aircraft. (Phoenix is the only operator that has twin-engines based in Fort McMurray year-round.) He said that most of the work they’re now able to do with the twin-engines was due to a lead company – most often the oil companies – demanding it, such as a request for dual pilots. He pressed Eurocopter to introduce dual hydraulic technology in the AS350 B3, and had to endure a one-year production delay in order to have it installed in the aircraft. Phoenix trained some pilots for multi-engine . . . and then the original contract requiring it never materialized. “It’s the ‘build it and they’ll come’ philosophy,” said Spring. “It hasn’t always worked, but generally if you’re willing to hang on long enough, it’ll prove out.”

A True Utility Worker
Phoenix is a year-round operation, but with winter temperatures in Fort McMurray sinking as low as -40C, and daylight shortened to as little as seven hours, the bulk of the company’s work is done in the five months from May through September. To cope with this shift in workload, seasonal pilots are brought in over the summer, raising the number of pilots from about six over the winter, to 13 or 14. When Phoenix began operations in 1992, most of the work was in firefighting and forest management; but now, the majority is tied to the oils sands – and in particular, environmental oversight. This involves flying passengers out to remote locations for data collection, whether it be for wildlife, water or soil. But the operator also has a role to play for the oil companies, from giving potential investors aerial tours of the area, to flying exploratory teams out to sites for core hole drilling programs.

“Our guys know that we’re not supposed to pick sides, and we don’t talk out of school,” said Spring. “We’ll fly for maybe Greenpeace or a native community that’s fighting an oil project, and we’ll also fly the financiers and the management on that project. We get to hear all the different sides to the story and we can’t pick a side, so it’s really neutral. We’re there as a flying service, not as an opinion.”
In addition to work provided by the oil sands, Phoenix offers passenger transport, cargo transport, aerial construction, wildfire suppression, and still and video photography; the company has worked with National Geographic and the BBC to produce spectacular footage for documentaries. Phoenix is also completing an increasing amount of medical evacuations, and typically keeps a non-chartered aircraft ready to leave at a moment’s notice if an emergency call does come in.

Accountability
While the creation of Phoenix’s fleet broke some ground in terms of innovation, that’s far from the end of the technological advances at the company. While customer requirements – predominantly oil company auditors, but also government agencies – are a driving force behind much of this, Spring is naturally inclined to introduce cutting-edge technology to increase the safety margin of his fleet. “If we see an issue, we ask the question: ‘Is there a technology solution to this that will get us through?’ We may not use that very often, but the one day you need it, you really need it. . . . It’s part of being ready all the time for everything at a moment’s notice. That’s what we’re recognized for,” he said.

Spring wanted flight data monitoring (FDM) after he saw manufacturer Appareo’s booth at Heli-Expo about five years ago. The company hadn’t received parts manufacturer approval yet, but he was told it would be ready that fall. Over the summer, one of Phoenix’s AStars suffered a fatal crash. Afterwards, it emerged that the pilot had flown dangerously with passengers before. “Everybody stood up and said, ‘The pilot does that all the time. . . . We were always scared to fly with him.’ But nobody had said anything [before the crash]. There’s this culture of silence protecting bad pilots, but passengers have a right to expect safe transportation throughout their daily activities. And if you don’t feel your pilot is providing that, you should speak up.”

Appareo GAU 2000 data recorders and OuterLink satellite tracking systems with OVVR (OuterLink voice and video recorder) are now in place across the Phoenix fleet. The system records all flight parameters – altitude, attitude, pitch, rate of climb, rate of descent – and checks for non-compliance with company standard operating procedures. Steep bank, strange pitch angles (as may be recorded from performing long line work) or flying too fast at too low a speed are the sorts of red flags that will cause a flight to be marked for review when the data is sent to Appareo’s mainframe in Fargo, N.D., at the end of each week. The mission is then matched to the data to see if the job required the pilot to perform those manoeuvres. Something like a photo shoot would send up a lot of red flags, but the job would warrant that type of flying. Flying in a similar manner during a simple passenger transport, however, would result in disciplinary action.

Other systems combine to provide a complete overview of the aircraft and cockpit throughout a flight, from exceedance recording (over-temps, over-torques etc.), to voice recording, and video recording of the cockpit’s instrument panel. A dispatch-style communications system, called MediaWorks, records all conversations on the company’s private radio channel, eliminating possible errors when transcribing to a radio log. “It allows us to maintain accurate information on passenger manifests and aircraft intentions,” said Spring. “It helps for clarity.” In the helicopter industry in general, this level of oversight and accountability is highly unusual. In the Canadian bush, it’s unheard of, and has lead to accusations of a “Big Brother” operation at Phoenix from some pilots within the industry.

“They don’t understand it,” said Spring. “It’s all about selling a concept. . . . If they’re with the right company, this thing will be hugely beneficial to them. They’ll have a good aircraft that they can rely on and hasn’t been abused by the previous pilot, and they’ll have backup . . . which we’ve used over and over again. We’ve used our systems more to defend our pilots against false accusations than anything else. . . . It’s Big Brother as in your buddy Big Brother, not as in George Orwell’s totalitarian Big Brother.”

Darrel Peters is chief pilot at Phoenix. He’s been with the company since 2000, and has been chief pilot for eight years, so much of this new technology has been introduced during his watch. “I don’t know anyone else in the industry that’s doing what we’re doing within VFR [visual flight rules],” he told Skies. “I think other companies are developing standards, but I haven’t seen anyone else out there committed to it. They’re not embracing the culture. With some of the events here that have been captured on video, and it relieved the pilot of any blame . . . that pays for itself.” The video and audio has also protected the company on the maintenance side – an engine recently seized up right out of overhaul on startup. The incident was caught on tape, resulting in a full warranty engine being sent immediately from Turbomeca.

Still, for many pilots, adapting to Phoenix’s standards and procedures can be a tough transition. “The example I would give is how we arrive and leave from the yard here, where we kind of use it like an airplane runway,” said Peters. “A good portion of the pilots we hire are just used to lifting up and going. . . . It’s hard. You’ve never had a wreck in let’s say 3,000 hours, yet I want you to start flying in a way that Phoenix feels is a lot safer and complies with what a lot of the oil companies want.” Peters said that candidates that visit Phoenix are shown a set of slides and videos to illustrate what the company is doing with FDM – and why. “The guys that are positive forward thinkers get it right away. The guys that go, ‘Oh, Big Brother type stuff,’ we know that they’re not the guys we want here anyway.”

An Engineer’s Dream
Art Volckaert, who, at the time of Skies’ visit, was the head of maintenance at Phoenix, was part of a crew of seven (eight including Spring, who is also a licenced maintenance engineer) that looks after the fleet of seven aircraft. With $1.5 million of inventory at his disposal, top-of-the-line equipment to work with, and a new 19,000-square-foot, $4 million hangar to work in, Volckaert is aware he is in a unique situation.
“It’s one of the best companies I’ve worked with,” the 35-year industry veteran told Skies. “Because of the flexibility, because of the way Paul wants to work things. Once he’s explained his vision and where he wants to go, if you’re onside with that, away you go. If you’re not a perfectionist, he’s a hard guy to work for, but if you are, he’s a great guy to work for. He just expects the best out of everybody and of himself. And I guess you can see that by the products and the hangars and the way things are set up.”

The maintenance team can perform everything up to and including level two maintenance on the aircraft – level three is component overhaul. The inventory is composed of new equipment, purchased directly from the manufacturer. “It is expensive, but I’m getting the warranty, and I’m getting the parts that I need,” said Volckaert. New technology used by the maintenance crew includes an IPlex borescope, which measures such things as cracks within an engine. “The few times that I’ve already measured cracks I’ve been able to keep engines in service, where normally we’d have had to remove the engines and send them back,” said Volckaert. “So, it’s already paid for itself many times over.”

The new hangar, built alongside the original 9,000-square-foot hangar, allows the entire Phoenix fleet to be brought inside each night, providing a temperature-controlled environment in which the maintenance engineers can do their daily checks. An overhead crane can lift three tonnes, while under-floor heating provides comfort during the cold northern winter. A one-piece hydraulic door is wide enough for a Sikorsky Skycrane to fit through, and it’s clad in custom-made plastic panels shipped from Germany to allow winter sunlight through for passive solar heating – and natural sunlight in spades. A 24-foot Big Ass Fan circulates the heat through the space to prevent ice damming and damage on the eaves.

“You’ve got to think about the end user,” said Spring. “Moving forward and building stuff like this, I think like a mechanic; not as a business owner, not as a pilot. I think, ‘OK, I’ve pulled a lot of engines, transmissions, blades, tail booms. How would I like to see this thing work?’”

The most important end-user, of course, is the customer. And they certainly seem to appreciate Phoenix’s efforts to make every aspect of its operation exceptional. The ringing endorsements of oil company auditors, a group not particularly renowned for effusive praise, affirm what Spring is trying to do with regards to safety. Proudly displayed in the entrance way are numerous “Thank You” cards and letters from customers. Many of these are the result of community events and initiatives in which Phoenix has taken part, illustrating the deep ties between the operator and the city.

“More and more people are coming here and raising families,” said Spring. “There’s a lot more community events, now: concerts, plays, all sorts of stuff going on. We flew the bid committee for the 2015 Western Canadian Summer Games when they came here, and we ended up winning that. For a while this was just a place to go work. But we’re really feeling the community side of it grow back in.”