All Set for Growth

Today, with 100-plus employees, Blackcomb operates 29 aircraft from permanent bases at Vancouver International Airport, Victoria, Squamish, Whistler, Pemberton, Bridge River Valley, Lillooet, Sechelt and stateside – in Phoenix, Ariz.,  under Blackcomb Aviation USA. Co-owned by the McLean family of Vancouver’s McLean Group of Companies, the company has built a solid foundation of assets and a reputation for technically-specialized aviation services to a diverse range of customers. 

To keep pace with growth, Blackcomb shored up its leadership team in 2013 with the appointment of a business-savvy president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Burke, whose background in aviation and business was made to measure. The company is now poised to further expand its offerings of helicopters, private jets, and aircraft management services to industries, business travellers, and private citizens throughout North America. 

In 1995, Morris was happily running Fletcher Challenge’s fleet of six fixed and rotary wing aircraft at YVR, but the pulp and paper business was in decline. 

“The industry had shrunk to a point where the ‘royal barges’ had to go,” recalled Morris, the director and accountable executive – and joint owner – of Blackcomb Aviation. “They came to me and said you need to find homes for the airplanes and the people, and wind it up.” But when they asked him to provide a level of reduced support, he quickly spotted an opportunity. “I went back to them with a proposal, bought a couple of the assets, and that’s where we started.” He set up his own company, Omega Air Corporation, initially contracting flight services to his previous employer. 

In Canada’s West Coast aviation business, everyone thinks they know everyone else, but there is always room for surprise. For Morris, it was an introduction to Sacha McLean, a young entrepreneur, pilot, and second-generation member of The McLean Group – a Vancouver-based family business that built, owned, and operated one of the largest modern sound stage facilities in B.C., Vancouver Film Studios (VFS).  Under Sacha’s leadership as president of VFS, the studios had expanded their film services to include production equipment rentals and an industry-tailored communications system. Next stop – aviation. 

“The McLean family decided it would be good to have an aviation asset as part of their film business, so Sacha came to me and asked what kind of aircraft I’d suggest and would I take care of it. Like me, Sacha is a pilot and an aviation junkie, so we hit it off,” said Morris.  

He recommended a Eurocopter AS355 TwinStar helicopter, which is still in Blackcomb’s fleet today. “It was the right fit for the McLeans’ film clients,” said Morris, “and since we didn’t have a twin at Omega at that time, our relationship with Sacha and The McLean Group through that aircraft gave us access to movie work, which became a Blackcomb specialty niche down the road.”

If the TwinStar buy was the seed that grew into the present McLean-Morris joint ownership of Blackcomb Aviation, the relationship really germinated in 2006. That’s when Morris got chatting with old friend Steve Flynn, who then owned Whistler-based Blackcomb Helicopters. 

“Steve decided he wanted to sell his business and I was the first phone call,” recalled Morris. But it was too big for Omega. “So I went to Sacha and said, is the McLean family interested? The answer was yes. That conversation with Sacha was the nucleus of what we have here today.” Acquisitions continued when a year later, Blackcomb acquired Goldwing Helicopters, a small specialty operation in Sechelt. 

The mix of assets under new ownership dictated a need to blend operations under one umbrella. So in 2008, the two main businesses – Omega and Blackcomb Helicopters – were branded under the trade name Blackcomb Aviation. Morris noted that partnering with The McLean Group, which owns and operates other businesses in addition to Vancouver Film Studios and Blackcomb Aviation, enabled Blackcomb to draw from the McLeans’ considerable resources in the areas of HR, communications, construction, legal, and finance. 

By 2012, with Sacha McLean as CEO and John Morris as president and accountable executive, Blackcomb had established itself as an industry leader in specialty hydro operations, tourism, heli-skiing, mining, oil and gas exploration, general forestry services, emergency services, firefighting, private jet charters, wildlife management, and aircraft management services for other aircraft owners. With continued growth projected, the board of directors – including chairman Jason McLean; chairman emeritus, David McLean; vice chairman, Sacha McLean; and director, John Morris – appointed Jonathan Burke as president and COO after an international search for the right candidate.

Flying since 1989, Burke has worked as a captain for Helifor Industries, as chief pilot for Southern Mountain Helicopters, as a contract pilot for Tundra Helicopters in Mexico, and as co-owner/operator of Yukon Airways. That experience is complemented by an MBA with post-graduate studies at the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University. Burke’s experience was honed by executive positions in private and public biotechnology companies like Migenix Inc. and Biomax Technologies. “They thought I had an understanding of at least all the acronyms used in the aviation business, having been there and done that,” said the affable and engaging Burke – but in truth, he hit the ground running with a company-wide strategic planning process.

“We went through the exercise of asking ourselves who we were, who we wanted to be in five years, and how we were going to get there,” said Burke. “‘How do we start organizing ourselves for growth?’ was the key question. It’s one thing to cobble together a bunch of Lego blocks and try to create a larger block, but it’s another thing to set it up so it can grow with all the sustainable systems and the right people and processes in place.” Burke’s strategy was to establish a solid base of operational systems and install them to handle growth. “So that if we added three, four or five aircraft, or a fleet, the systems could handle it,” explained Burke.

Such an expansion would bolster the company’s presence in all of its current industry sectors, while continuing to maintain its original and separate Aircraft Maintenance Organization (AMO) certificates. 

Blackcomb Aviation’s specialty markets are diverse, but a particular strength and synergy in one of them comes from The McLean Group’s ownership of Vancouver Film Studios. 

In 1977, Steve Wright was just off a stint with the RCMP and learning to fly on Bell 47G helicopters. He bought his first machine in 1981, which eventually grew to 16-helicopter strong Vancouver Helicopters, which Wright sold in 1996.  

In an office lined with award-winning shots – like two barefoot water skiers hanging onto helicopter skids, and the Royal Hudson steam locomotive near Lillooet in the rugged Fraser Canyon – Wright has been VP of business development and aerial coordinator for Blackcomb since 2009.

“During the time I had my own company, I got heavily involved in the film industry,” he said. “I was flying a lot for BCTV and developed an eye for photography.” Now, with hundreds of films under his belt (“I think I quit counting after 200”), he’s an experienced and internationally-known aerial coordinator. “In the film industry, helicopters are used for a number of different things: location scouting, moving people and equipment back and forth to remote locations, and for use as camera ships,” he said. “They are also in the movies – written into the script as part of the action. We call them picture ships.” 

He said the aerial coordinator is much like the stunt coordinator on the ground. “It needs a lot of experience – we’re trying to achieve images on film that follow the requirements of the script and the director. But you’ve got to do it safely, and that’s the whole key to understanding how the films are made. We may ‘cheat’ a bit in a certain way so you can’t see the difference on the big screen, but we know we had a cut there and the guy was cabled onto the train and then we cabled him onto the helicopter. It can take a long time to do a sequence, because we’re doing it all with a safety consideration.”

Camera operators used to stand on the skid with a harness on and hang out the door. But now, Wright said they use special gyro-stabilized cameras with GPS technology, mounted in balls on the nose or side of the helicopter. “The camera operator sits inside – he’s got a monitor and his own joystick, with the director sitting in the back calling the play. It’s an in-concert thing where the camera, the pilot, the director of photography and the operator have to be in harmony with what they’re shooting,” he explained. Where the helicopter is the star, they often will have fake rockets or other gadgets mounted on what they call swat platforms.

A camera pilot needs to be on his or her toes and precision is key. Wright tells of a particularly tricky sequence involving a well-known actor and a train in the Cheakamus Canyon near Whistler. “It was a very narrow canyon, a train trestle and a train. We had a helicopter above picking up a guy off the train,” he said. “Then I was above him in another helicopter with a camera shooting down through the rotor disc – so I had to connect the helicopter, the guy, the train, the trestle, and the creek. You didn’t have much room and you had to be precise, but it was fun.”

Overall, the fun of an individual niche market can be offset with the challenges facing the aviation business. As Blackcomb moves forward, Morris identified parts of the regulatory process one of those hurdles. 

“In general, Transport Canada is short-staffed and their people are burdened with a number of new regulatory processes that are difficult to manage, given their resources,” he said. “Throw in the new regulatory issues over POCs (Private Operating Certificates) and the various interpretations of it and/or what should be done about it, and we are suffering huge delays in approvals for our managed aircraft. I find it frustrating, and we have had opportunities that didn’t materialize because of it. Transport Canada’s staff is working to capacity to deal with the backlog, but it would be nice if the regulator was given more resources to hire additional staff.”  

Burke added to that the internal challenges, like setting up systems that allow for growth: financial systems, employee incentive systems, and getting the right mix of people on board – finding skilled pilots and engineers quickly and keeping them in the face of competition from WestJet, Air Canada, and general aviation industry expansion. 

Audits are a big time-consumer, too. “Death by a thousand audits,” Burke called it. “We get audited by Wyvern and ARGUS for a number of our film customers, in addition to audits by BC Hydro and others on the utility side of the business. From February to June, we undergo up to 10 audits by external organizations.” But, he said, it’s a worthwhile investment which adds “measureable value to us and our services.”

With systems and strategies fortified, Blackcomb looks to the future. 

“The key thing for me has been to get people thinking about where we want to be in five years,” said Burke. “Because when you start focusing on what this business would look like with three or four additional fixed wing aircraft – mid-size or super mid size jets – and maybe five or 10 more helicopters doing utility, construction and maintenance work – the way forward is clear.” 

Some of the focus will involve growing the Arizona base. “Many of the power line providers in the U.S. are using single engine helicopters and typically don’t have the safety management systems that we have,” explained Burke. “More and more utilities are demanding twin engine helicopters.” And there’s a bonus: when the skies are grey and dark on Canada’s West Coast, Blackcomb can shift its resources to projects in sunnier locations. 

Burke said all new expansion is governed by three critical words established by the owners: safety, respect and value. “We have them printed on our hangar walls, our office walls, and on every document we give to people – it means respect for the safety of our customers, our employees, and our equipment; and by extension, value – value for them and value for us.”  

Burke summed up Blackcomb’s strategic objectives for the future. “First is operational safety and efficiency,” he said. “Second is sales and growth; and third is continued investment in our people and our culture.”

Speaking on behalf of ownership, John Morris said that in five years they would like to see all the new systems “humming along like a fine watch, with our fixed wing management business grown from five jet aircraft to eight or 10, but not bigger than that – it’s the right size for us.” 

They’re on their way: at the time of writing, Blackcomb Aviation had just taken delivery of a 2013 Falcon 2000 LX.