Era Group Brand Guidelines: Alaska’s 1948 Helicopter Operator, Merged Into Bristow in 2020

A Bell 47 and a mapping contract in Alaska.

Era Group traces its start to 20 June 1948, when the pilot Carl Brady founded Economy Helicopters and flew the first commercial helicopter to Alaska for a U.S. government mapping contract, English Wikipedia says. Bristow, which now owns the business, tells the same story on its history page: Brady brought a Bell 47B north to help federal surveyors map the territory, and by 1950 the company had added petroleum support work on the Kenai Peninsula. In 1953 or 1954, Bristow says, it opened a permanent office in Anchorage and began oil surface-geology work.

The name came from a partnership. In 1958, according to Bristow’s history, Economy Helicopters joined Rotor Aids in a joint venture called ERA Helicopters — “E” for Economy and “RA” for Rotor Aids. English Wikipedia describes the change more simply as a renaming. Either way, the three letters began as an abbreviation of two company names, and over time the business wrote them as a single word, Era.

In 1967 the Houston drilling contractor Rowan Companies bought the company from its founder, English Wikipedia says, and Bristow adds that Brady joined Rowan’s board as part of the deal. Under Rowan, Era’s helicopters supported the building of the Alyeska pipeline across Alaska, and the company started a fixed-wing division with de Havilland Twin Otter and Convair aircraft, which began scheduled passenger service in Alaska in May 1983, according to English Wikipedia. In 1988 the parent company was renamed Era Aviation, with Era Helicopters kept as a division.

From Alaska to the Gulf, through Rowan and SEACOR.

Alaska was the start, but offshore oil became the core. English Wikipedia says most of Era’s business under Rowan was support for offshore drilling. Bristow’s history adds that, while still based in Alaska, Era began flying exclusive-use contracts in the Gulf — a customer hiring a dedicated aircraft for a set job — and that in 1969 Rowan bought two Sikorsky S-64E Skycrane heavy-lift helicopters to carry drilling equipment in Alaska. In 1970, Bristow says, Era set up its first foreign operation, in Nicaragua, followed by work in the Middle East and Africa.

In the Gulf the company put down roots at Lake Charles, Louisiana. Bristow’s history describes the original base there as a house trailer with four aircraft: two Bell 205s and two Bell 206Bs. The same timeline lists firefighting work in Canada in the 1980s and a contract that took two Bell 212s to support an offshore drilling project off the Siberian coast.

The airline and the helicopters then went separate ways. In 2004, Bristow says, SEACOR Holdings bought Era Aviation from Rowan to sit alongside its existing aviation business, Tex-Air, and soon sold the fixed-wing certificate. English Wikipedia dates the spin-off of the Era Helicopters division to 1 July 2004. The fixed-wing side later traded as Era Alaska and then as Ravn Alaska, a separate company with no link to the helicopter group. In 2013 SEACOR spun its helicopter business off as Era Group, a separately listed company, according to English Wikipedia’s article on SEACOR Holdings.

As Era Group, the company kept its Gulf operations and worked abroad with partners. Bristow’s history records a partnership with the Brazilian operator Aeróleo, which served oil exploration and production in Brazil, and an entry into Colombia with the local operator Sicher Helicopters. In 2018 Era Group marked 70 years of service, counting from the 1948 start in Alaska.

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.

Merged into Bristow, June 2020.

Era Group no longer trades as a separate company. Its merger with Bristow Group was announced on 24 January 2020 and completed in June 2020, Offshore Energy reported on 12 June 2020. The deal was structured as a reverse triangular merger in which Era issued shares to Bristow’s stockholders, who ended up with about three-quarters of the combined company; just before closing, Era carried out a one-for-three reverse stock split. The combined company took the Bristow name, kept its headquarters in Houston and stayed listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Bristow’s own history gives the date as 12 June 2020 and says the company then began trading under the ticker VTOL.

So the corporate shell was Era’s, but the identity was Bristow’s. Offshore Energy wrote that the combined fleet centred on the Sikorsky S-92 and the Leonardo AW189 and AW139, and that the new board included two members from legacy Era, among them its chief executive. Today the old erahelicopters.com address forwards to Bristow’s website, where Era appears as history: a timeline that tells the Economy Helicopters story beside Alan Bristow’s 1955 start in Britain.

The name itself has a second strand. The fixed-wing business that left in 2004 kept using Era for some years, as Era Alaska, and in January 2014 renamed itself Ravn Alaska; English Wikipedia says the company gave the reason as reducing confusion with other companies named Era, including the helicopter operator, which was by then a listed company in its own right. When the helicopter business merged in 2020, the name of the partner whose shareholders held the larger stake was the one kept.

For a design guide, Era Group shows how a short name born as an abbreviation can travel through several owners before being folded into a merger partner’s brand. Compare Bristow, the name the merged company kept, and PHI, another Gulf operator, founded in Louisiana a year after Era. For this guide we use a deep navy, a glacier blue and a warm signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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