A Great Lakes Life

Canadian Skies recently spent time at the bases of the two companies at the Region of Waterloo International Airport to discuss how they carved out a successful niche for themselves in the somewhat unlikely rotorcraft market of Southwestern Ontario, and how the business has evolved over the years to adapt to changing — and extremely challenging — market conditions.

While the “mom-and-pop” label isn’t always something a company is happy to wear, the Leyburnes have no problem with it. For them, it represents the level of personalized service and care they provide not only to their customers — whether they be in the form of an operator needing an aircraft overhaul at Rotor Services, or a student pilot at GLH — but to their staff, too. And it’s appreciated. For example, hanging on the wall of GLH’s conference room is a painting completed by a student that had graduated the week before Canadian Skies’ visit in June. The student was clearly a talented artist, too. The painting depicts a helicopter in flight in front of a spectacular backdrop of snow-peaked mountains, with blue skies as far as the eye can see. “She painted it the day she did her first flight, because she said that’s her dream,” said Jo Anne. “[After she graduated] she came in and said, ‘You guys made my dream come true, so I wanted to give this to you.’ ” 

The two companies also enjoy excellent staff retention — another validation, perhaps, of the sort of working environment the Leyburnes have sought to create. Four of the six aircraft maintenance engineers (AMEs) working at Rotor Services have been there for at least 10 years, while the chief flight instructor at GLH, Nick Booth, has been with the company since its inception in  2003.

“People see we all have the same goal — we’re trying to build a business for everybody,” said Bill. “But we care about more than the bottom line and making money; we care about our employees and the students and everyone else that comes through the door.” He did admit, though, that there was a downside to being a mom-and-pop operation. “People don’t see the quick growth in a mom-and-pop place as they would with a big investor who’s pumping money into business,” he said. But, despite this, people have stuck with them. “You would think that people would move on kind of quickly through our doors [because of the slower rate of growth], but it doesn’t really happen that way!” he said.

Neither Bill nor Jo Anne is a pilot, but, having spent their entire working lives in and around helicopters, they happily describe themselves as “helicopter people.” The two began their careers together at Sealand Helicopters in Newfoundland — Bill as an AME in the maintenance department and Jo Anne in administration, before Bill decided to establish his own company with a fellow AME called Wade Culliton in 1988. “I decided to strike out on my own, and Jo Anne was good enough to take a leap of faith and come with me,” said Bill. “We decided we would start a company in Southern Ontario to do AME-type work, supporting small operators that didn’t necessarily have full-time staff or a maintenance shop of their own, and we would start by offering a mobile type of a service, where we would go to their facility and do the work required, until such time as we settled on a location to get a hangar.” That location emerged as Waterloo Regional Airport (as it was then known) — it was within an hour’s drive of Toronto Pearson International Airport, enabling the company quick and easy access to flights throughout the country, if needed; it also happened to have a suitable space available for rent.

“We would fly or drive to a job site, whether that was at a hangar or in the bush somewhere, and carry out the service on-site,” said Bill. The team provided their support to companies across Canada and even worked overseas — most notably to set up approved maintenance organization (AMO) sub-bases in Croatia and Macedonia to support United Nations contracts. But the bulk of the company’s work was in Ontario. “We grew a local customer base, and started working with some operators in the area that turned out to be very long-term customers and lifelong friends, like Harold and Cheryl Bielefeld, owners of Standard Ag Helicopters.”

After three years of leasing their hangar, Bill and Jo Anne decided to build their own on one of the lots that was opening up at the airport at the time. “We built it primarily to be able to fit the aircraft in the area, which were small turbine helicopters — Bell 206 JetRangers, LongRangers, [Eurocopter] AStars, MD500… that size,” explained Bill. 

The company saw steady growth for much of the next decade, but in the first few years of the new millennium, Bill noticed the market was beginning to change. “The commercial market was drying up,” he said. “We started finding that the companies we were supporting were getting large enough to require their own people [to do their maintenance], so we started making a transition to more private helicopters and in-house work — [which meant] more work related to Robinson Helicopters, which was taking over in Southern Ontario as far as the light helicopter market was concerned.”

Bill decided the company should focus its growth efforts on servicing Robinson helicopters, to become capable of heavier maintenance and more substantial overhauls and repairs — such as the overhaul and repair of several dynamic components, and the replacement and repair of main rotor blade spindle assemblies. Rotor Services is now a factory-authorized service centre for the R22 and R44, and is in the process of procuring an AMO rating and factory service approval for the R66 Turbine, which recently gained its Canadian certification.

The new direction for Rotor Services dovetailed nicely with the Leyburnes’ establishment of Great Lakes Helicopter in 2003, with the first student flight taking place early the next year. “I thought that one of the side benefits of offering flight training would be to train individuals in the local area who were going to purchase helicopters — and  in most cases that would be a Robinson R44,” said Bill. “My goal was really to become more self-sufficient and generate my own work — rather than counting on business coming in the way it had when we started.”

In terms of results, there’s certainly been an increase in the number of aircraft in the area. According to Bill, there wasn’t a single local helicopter based at the Region of Waterloo Airport a decade ago — now, the company maintains more than 20 local Robinson Helicopters. “Right now, we’re busier than we’ve ever been,” said Bill. “I’ve hired on one AME and am looking at hiring on one or possibly two more apprentices.” The progression from apprentice to full-time licensed AME working at the shop has gone pretty smoothly in the past, with three of the six AMEs now working at Rotor Services having started as an apprentice of Bill’s.

In terms of work performed at Rotor Services, it can complete any maintenance or overhaul on the R22 and R44 that is currently possible outside of the manufacturer’s factory; overhauls up to and including the dynamic component level on the Bell 206 series; and general maintenance on Eurocopter and MD500 models. It also undertakes structural sheet metal work for Kitchener Aero Avionics in the neighboring hangar, and dynamic propeller balancing for fixed-wing aircraft at the airport. 

“It’s difficult to stay in Ontario and continue to find [rotorcraft] work, because 80 percent of the work in Canada is outside of Ontario,” said Bill. “It can provide its challenges in terms of keeping personnel. We are limited to the smaller helicopters, and guys who want to move on to more challenges with larger helicopters and different models often go to different parts of the world. But it hasn’t really been a real issue with me. I’ve been pretty lucky over the years with personnel.”

For several years before they took the plunge, Bill and Jo Anne had agreed that the Region of Waterloo Airport would be a great location to establish a flight school. With a population of over 500,000 people living within 20 minutes’ drive of the airport, the pair thought there would be a significant enough source of students to make it work. With the help of Nick Booth, a flight instructor they found through a mutual friend, they incorporated the flight school in November 2003 — with first flights taking place the following March.

The school began with single R22, then a Bell 206 was added to provide a turbine option, and as the business continued to develop, the fleet has continued to grow, to its current state of three R22s, three R44s, and the Bell 206.

“Over the years we’ve trained quite a few different types of students,” said Booth. “From business execs, to guys and girls coming in who are literally scraping pennies together so they can start their careers. But we try to instill in them that sense of safety. . . . I would like every student I train to be a better pilot than I am. I know I can only give them the foundation — the fundamentals — and whatever they choose to do for the rest of their career is up to them. But if I can instill in them the safety values and the experience that I have, then I’ve done my job.”

He said he thought the fact that the company hasn’t aimed for exponential growth over the years, in favor of a more personal approach, is what has led to its survival during tough economic times. “It’s a family-run, family-controlled company,” he said. “Everyone’s on a first-name basis; we enjoy what we do. It’s never been about growth, it’s been about personality. . . . But watching where we’ve gone from a single office and a desk to the facility that we have now… It’s definitely been fun — and challenging.”

From the beginning, Great Lakes has also offered charter services – from sightseeing and photography flights to offering helicopter rides at local fairs. “We wanted to concentrate on flight training,” said Bill, “but we found that we needed to offer some other services as well, just to fill the gaps and to also give students the opportunity to work within the company a little bit. It’s something that students are looking for as they progress through.”

With Bill overseeing operations at Rotor Services, Jo Anne oversees operations at Great Lakes. As part of the company’s marketing work — and as a reality check to would-be commercial pilots — she holds free monthly information sessions, giving full and frank details about the process of learning to fly and what can be expected in the job market following graduation.

To help boost students’ employability upon graduation, Great Lakes tries various ways to bring the “real world” into their training — from bringing in pilots currently working in the utility sector, air medical, and airborne law enforcement for talks with the students; to encouraging regular visits to the staff at Rotor Services to learn more about the maintenance aspect; to setting up an annual northern winter training camp. The week-long winter camp gives students experience in aspects of bush operations such as sling training, helipad construction, care for aircraft left outside overnight, and winter survival techniques. 

Another recent development is a partnership with Conestoga College (a local polytechnic institute) to offer the commercial license as part of a two-year diploma in General Arts and Science. “What I say to people is, anything that you can put on your resume that’s going to make it look better than the person next to you, it’s worth doing,” said Jo Anne. “In the Conestoga program, they do marketing, they do business, and they do resume writing — so they learn a lot of skills that could be helpful to an operator.”

Since Great Lakes established its flight school in 2003, several other flight schools in the region have come and gone. According to Jo Anne, the two businesses helped each other during times of economic difficulty, with the flight school booming in 2005 as Rotor Services went through its period of transition, and Rotor Services helping the flight school through a huge drop in private pilot students that took place after the economic downturn in 2008. 

And then, in November 2011, with business at the flight school growing healthily once more, a tragic accident put all other issues into perspective. Tiffany Hanna, a flight instructor who had been with the company for almost five years, was fatally injured after an engine failure less than a minute into a routine flight training exercise with a student in an R22. The official Transportation Safety Board report into the accident put the cause of the engine failure as likely carburetor icing. “You never get over it,” said Jo Anne. “You think at times beforehand that things are difficult, then an accident like this happens and it makes everything else seem minor in comparison. . . I wanted to quit the helicopter business, I was done. I thought there was no way I could carry on. It was probably the staff, even more than Bill, who picked me up — they told me that the last thing Tiffany would have wanted was to give up.”

Bill said that recovering from the accident has been a long — and continuous — process. “We looked at it and said, ‘We’ve got to go on. We have students that are training here. We can’t just shut down. We can’t leave them in the lurch. We have staff that rely on us.’ ”

Pictures of Hanna appear throughout the offices at Great Lakes, but Jo Anne said they were determined that her memory wouldn’t just be associated with grief.  “She was a very special person and friend, and we want her remembered. We think about her every day.”

Continued evolution seems to have been the hallmark of the Leyburnes’ businesses in Kitchener. As Rotor Services passed its 20th anniversary, Great Lakes made a move into agricultural operations, developing a new branch of the company that would provide great training and work for recent graduates, and a strong and steady stream of income to the company itself.

Stan Mance oversees marketing and customer relations for the aerial application side of the business. Mance was a local tool and dye business owner before he was hit by a self-diagnosed “mid-life crisis,” and he decided he wanted to be a helicopter pilot. He took his training at Great Lakes, and when the Leyburnes approached him about developing an aerial application business for the company, he jumped at the chance — despite having to learn the business from scratch, and having to establish a market for the work in the region. 

“There was a lot of investigation,” said Mance. “I met with retailers, farmers, and started asking lots of questions — and they were extremely helpful. “ He said the high cost of land in Southern Ontario meant that investing to maximize yields on existing land was often a preferred alternative for farmers who wanted to grow their business. The smaller lots also lent themselves well to helicopter rather than fixed-wing application. “Anybody that started with the application has continued to do it,” said Mance. “The results of the application and the product itself have been great for them.”

In addition to aerial application, Great Lakes also works with the agriculture sector through frost protection. Finally, together with Zimmer Air Services, it completes forestry work in Northern Ontario. All told, this flourishing part of the business made up a big percentage of Great Lakes’ income over the past year.

Going forward, Bill said they hope to bring together the various branches of the company under one roof with the construction of a new hangar — or expansion of the current 5,000-square-foot facility at Rotor Services. With the maintenance hangar currently pushed to capacity, the aim is to provide enough room to accommodate growth in that business, while adding the space required for the flight school — for a total of about 12,500 feet. “We’d like to consolidate into one place if we could, but we’d still need the separation between the maintenance and the flight ops, so it’d have to be the right sort of place,” said Bill.

Asked what drives the couple’s continued passion for the business, they say the enthusiasm of the students and the people around them encourages a deep involvement in the companies, while the challenge of overcoming difficulties and solving problems keeps their work interesting. “The people you meet in this industry — whether it’s AMEs, or pilots, or customers generally, are good people,” said Bill. “Anyone who’s in the helicopter business has to have a certain passion for it and has to enjoy it, because it’s not an easy thing to do. But even with all the issues that come up and certain problems, it’s still a good business to be in.”