Cougar Helicopters Brand Guidelines: A 1984 Charter, VIH Ownership & S-92s in St. John’s

From an airport shuttle to the offshore.

Cougar Helicopters began as a small charter business. The company’s own timeline says it was incorporated on 10 February 1984 by Ingo Strackenjan and Earl MacFarland, and that its first work was a shuttle service from an airport to a city centre. In 1987, the timeline continues, Jim Johnston became the owner, and he remained the owner until 2003.

Offshore work came quickly. Cougar dates its first offshore support contract to 1990, in Gijón, in northern Spain, and its first work for the offshore industry of Nova Scotia to 1991. It says that the same year it won the first Canadian civilian search-and-rescue contract, flying a Sikorsky S-76 from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. In 1993, the timeline adds, it began air-ambulance flights in Nova Scotia and Ontario.

The move that defined the company came in the mid-1990s, in Newfoundland. Cougar says it won an offshore support contract from Hibernia Management and Development Company (HMDC) in St. John’s in 1995, completed its own heliport at St. John’s International Airport in 1997 and began flying there with Super Puma and S-61 helicopters. A contract with Petro-Canada, now part of Suncor, followed in 1998 and one with Husky Energy in 2002, according to the company.

Today English Wikipedia describes Cougar as a St. John’s-based commercial helicopter company serving the oil and gas fields off the coast of Newfoundland, with permanent facilities in St. John’s and Halifax. It lists the fields as Hibernia, Terra Nova, White Rose and Hebron–Ben Nevis.

The VIH Aviation Group, then Bristow.

In 2003, according to its timeline, Cougar was bought from Jim Johnston by the VIH Aviation Group of Victoria, British Columbia, a group whose roots go back to 1955. VIH’s website, which carries the line “Pride in Service since 1955,” lists Cougar alongside VIH Aerospace, VIH Execujet, VIH Helicopters and an airport service business at Victoria International Airport, and gives the group’s head office as North Saanich, British Columbia. VIH calls VIH Helicopters “Canada’s oldest privately owned helicopter company.” Cougar’s own website still signs itself “A VIH Aviation Group Company.”

The second ownership step came in 2012. On 4 September that year the US helicopter operator Bristow Group announced that it would take a minority stake in Cougar, Vertical magazine reported the next day. Under the plan, Bristow would buy new Class B shares in Cougar Aviation, a VIH subsidiary, giving it 25 percent of the voting power and 40 percent of the economic interest. It would also buy Cougar’s core fleet of seven Sikorsky S-92 helicopters and its passenger, maintenance and search-and-rescue facilities at the St. John’s and Halifax airports, and lease the aircraft back to Cougar.

The deal needed approval from the Canadian Transportation Agency, which, Vertical explained, requires at least 75 percent of an air carrier’s voting interests to be held by Canadians. Cougar’s timeline records 2012 as the year Bristow invested in the company, and English Wikipedia says Bristow holds a financial stake. VIH’s owner, Kenneth Norie, was to stay on as Cougar’s chairman and chief executive, Vertical reported.

At the time Vertical called Cougar “Canada’s largest domestic offshore and search-and-rescue helicopter operator.” Its report described a typical week of 25 scheduled S-92 departures from St. John’s to platforms run by HMDC, ExxonMobil, Suncor and Husky Energy, and up to three flights a day from Halifax for EnCana and ExxonMobil. In 2014, Cougar says, it won a multi-year, multi-aircraft contract with ExxonMobil Canada Properties, HMDC, Suncor and Husky.

Offshore helicopter operators.

Offshore helicopter operators sell a narrow service: moving crews and cargo between airports and installations at sea, and standing by for search and rescue. Their websites tend to follow the same plan. Bristow divides its work into offshore energy services, search and rescue, government services and advanced air mobility; CHC lists offshore transportation, search and rescue, emergency medical services, utility work and maintenance.

Colour carries much of the identity. Liveries vary from operator to operator, from navy to red and orange, and some choices carry history: when CHC came out of Chapter 11 in 2017 it changed its company colours to the orange of Okanagan Helicopters, one of its founding companies, Vertical reported. The photographs the companies publish tend to show helicopters over open sea or on helidecks, next to fleet pages arranged by type, from the Sikorsky S-92 to the Airbus H175 and the Leonardo AW139 and AW189.

Base maps are another constant. In the North Sea they run from Aberdeen, Norwich and Humberside to Stavanger and Den Helder; other networks reach the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil’s Santos Basin, West Africa, Australia and Southeast Asia. Contract news fills the press pages: crew-change deals with energy companies, coastguard search-and-rescue contracts such as those in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands, and maintenance work, which CHC sells under its Heli-One name.

Many of these operators have also been reshaped by restructurings and mergers. CHC filed for Chapter 11 in 2016, Bristow’s US entities followed in 2019, and Bristow merged with Era Group in 2020, so investor pages, quarterly results and ticker symbols sit alongside the helicopters. This guide sets out what can be checked about each operator — who founded it, who owns it and where it flies — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One base, one main aircraft type.

Cougar’s fleet now centres on one type. The company says it flies Sikorsky S-92 helicopters for both offshore passenger transport and search and rescue, and that it introduced the S-92 to the Newfoundland and Labrador offshore market in 2005. English Wikipedia lists eight S-92A helicopters and one Bell 412EP as of May 2024. Cougar describes itself as a Transport Canada Approved Maintenance Organization that maintains its own S-92 fleet, and says its crews train on a CAE flight simulator in St. John’s.

Its search-and-rescue work is contracted to the offshore industry. Cougar says it has provided search and rescue to oil and gas clients since 1991, now from a purpose-built facility in St. John’s with a dedicated S-92, and that it was the first operator in North America, civilian or military, to use the S-92 in that role. Its timeline records the Excellence in SAR Innovation award from Canada’s National SAR Secretariat in 2013. Other services on its website include round-the-clock flight following from an operations control centre, helideck surveys and, since 2000, flare-tip replacement on offshore platforms with Norway’s Vertech Offshore.

The company has also worked beyond Atlantic Canada. Its timeline lists work in the Gulf of Mexico and the Northwest Territories from 2005, Alaska from 2006, the Australian offshore market from 2007 and Greenland from 2010, and a heliport at Halifax International Airport in 2011. In January 2010 Vertical reported that VIH Cougar Helicopters, a US company in the same group, had taken delivery of an AgustaWestland AW139 for offshore flights in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2016 Cougar opened a new heliport and hangar in St. John’s, and in 2019 it marked 35 years, the company says.

For a design guide, Cougar Helicopters shows how an operator’s identity can rest on one harbour city and one aircraft type. Compare Bristow, its minority shareholder since 2012, and CHC Helicopter, which Vertical described in 2012 as headquartered in Richmond, British Columbia. For this guide we use a harbour navy, an ice grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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