Omni Táxi Aéreo Brand Guidelines: Rio 2000, Petrobras Contracts & the OHI Group

One Bell 212 and a hangar at Jacarepaguá.

Omni Táxi Aéreo is the Brazilian arm of a Portuguese aviation group. The company says it was founded in December 2000 “on the pillars” of safety, integration, transparency, integrity and creativity, and that its first headquarters was at Jacarepaguá airport in Rio de Janeiro. Portuguese Wikipedia dates the wider Grupo OMNI, the private aviation group Omni Aviação SGPS based at Porto Salvo, in Oeiras near Lisbon, to 1988, and lists OMNI Táxi Aéreo, its operation in Brazil, under 2000. The group’s helicopter holding, Omni Helicopters International (OHI), says it began “fighting fires in Portugal in the 1990s” before moving into offshore crew change and emergency medical flights in Brazil; Portuguese Wikipedia dates OHI to 2011.

The company’s own timeline sets out the early years. Its first air-transport operating certificate came with a fleet of one Bell 212; its first medium-term contract with Petrobras used two EC135 helicopters; and it opened a hangar at Macaé, in Rio de Janeiro state, followed by a new hangar at Jacarepaguá. Next came the Leonardo AW139, two Sikorsky S-61s and two S-76C++ helicopters, and what the timeline calls the start of ten more contracts with Petrobras. It then records a capital investment from the British investment group Stirling Square, a move of its administrative headquarters to Barra da Tijuca in Rio, and the arrival of the Airbus H225 and the Sikorsky S-92.

Omni says that in 2009 it became the first air-taxi company in Brazil to receive ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification; its certifications page now names ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001. It holds an air operator certificate from Brazil’s civil aviation agency, ANAC, under the RBAC 135 rules for on-demand transport, and its maintenance workshop is approved under RBAC 145, which, the company says, lets it maintain other operators’ aircraft as well as its own. The same timeline records the integration of the operations of Senior Táxi Aéreo, the creation of Omni Helicopters Nigeria, and the company’s twentieth year of operations.

Petrobras, the Campos Basin and the pre-salt.

Petrobras is at the centre of the business. Omni’s “about” page says it serves the oil sector, “with emphasis on Petrobras,” providing offshore and onshore air transport across Brazil, external cargo flights and aeromedical transport. Its drone page says the company lands frequently on platforms in the Campos Basin and in the pre-salt fields, and the timeline lists work on Petrobras’s Equatorial Margin campaign and a base in Guyana.

Other energy clients appear in its releases. Omni says Equinor Brasil chose it for a contract supporting the Bacalhau field in the Santos Basin, flown from Jacarepaguá with one Sikorsky S-92 and two super-medium helicopters, a Leonardo AW189 and an Airbus H175; the same release says Omni is the only company in Brazil operating both of those types. In July 2024 Omni said it had completed a 64-day operation in Argentina supporting exploration for Equinor about 300 kilometres off Mar del Plata, with two AW139s and the local operator Helicópteros Marinos.

The fleet page lists ten helicopter types: the Airbus H225, H175, H160, H155, H145 and H135; the Sikorsky S-92A; and the Leonardo AW189, AW139 and AW119. The company’s timeline also records an ATR 42-500 turboprop as its first aeroplane, and later its first international ATR flight, between Macapá and Georgetown in Guyana. OHI’s own website speaks of “nine helicopter platforms and two heavy UAV types” across the group.

Unmanned work began in 2018, Omni says, with drone imaging. In July 2021 it signed a memorandum of understanding with Nordic Unmanned to represent and operate that company’s products in Brazil, and in 2022 OHI formed OHI Unmanned as a joint venture with it; Omni lists the Schiebel Camcopter S-100 among its drone types. In March 2026 the oil-industry news site Petronotícias reported that Roberto Coimbra, who has been part of the company’s Brazilian operations since its founding, was returning as chief executive and would continue to lead Omni Unmanned.

Design and documentation.

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.

A Lisbon holding with subsidiaries in Brazil, Guyana and Mozambique.

OHI is the group behind the brand. Omni’s own site describes it as a financial holding company based in Portugal that manages fleets and investments in helicopter operators. OHI’s website calls the group “Latin America’s largest provider of vertical air mobility and delivery solutions,” gives its head office in Lisbon, and names Guyana and Mozambique among its focus territories; Omni’s releases list the subsidiaries as Omni Táxi Aéreo in Brazil, Omni Helicopters Guyana and Omni Helicopters International Moçambique. The same releases name two newer ventures, OHI Unmanned for drones and Revo for advanced air mobility.

Leasing shapes the fleet. On 5 November 2026 Helicopter Investor reported that the lessor Milestone Aviation had signed a six-helicopter deal with OHI: three new AW189s, a five-year lease extension on an AW139 already flying offshore oil-and-gas missions for Omni, and two Sikorsky S-92s in search-and-rescue configuration for South America. The AW189s were scheduled for delivery in the fourth quarter of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027, and the S-92s in the first quarter of 2027. The magazine described Omni’s mission portfolio as crew change, emergency medical services, firefighting, search and rescue, and cargo and utility work in remote locations.

The Brazilian company’s structure is plain from its own pages: a Rio operator with its own certificates and maintenance approvals, inside a Portuguese group that owns sister operators elsewhere. OHI describes Omni as “the absolute leader” in Brazil’s offshore market; that is the group’s own description.

For a design guide, Omni Táxi Aéreo shows how an operator built around offshore oil fields presents itself through aircraft types, certificates and named clients. Compare Petrobras, the customer it names first, and Equinor, which chose Omni for its Bacalhau field. For this guide we use an Atlantic blue, a basin teal, a warm white and a coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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