PHI Brand Guidelines: Lafayette’s Yellow-and-Black Helicopters Since 1949

Three Bell 47s and the Louisiana marshes.

PHI began in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 1949. English Wikipedia names its founders as Robert L. Suggs and Maurice M. Bayon, who started with three Bell 47 helicopters flying a seismographic crew through the Louisiana wetlands. The company’s own 75th-anniversary release, dated 21 February 2024, gives its first name as Petroleum Bell Helicopters, later Petroleum Helicopters, Inc., and says the start-up had seven employees serving seismic crews exploring for oil and gas in the marshlands of South Louisiana.

The work moved offshore early. English Wikipedia says service extended to drilling platforms offshore, with Sikorsky S-55 and S-58 helicopters joining the fleet. PHI’s timeline says that in the 1950s, as exploration moved as far as 200 miles out to sea, it began basing helicopter operations at offshore locations and built offshore refuelling facilities, and that in the 1960s it ran a radio network linking 15 Gulf Coast bases with six offshore bases; these are the company’s own accounts. English Wikipedia also records a company heliport at Lake Palourde, in Morgan City.

The name shortened over the decades. The initials come from Petroleum Helicopters, Inc., and Vertical Magazine, in a November 2019 report, refers to the company’s renaming as PHI Inc. Today the website footer names PHI Group, Inc., headquartered in Lafayette, with PHI Aviation as the trading name of its energy-services business.

Yellow and black, offshore and in the air medical field.

PHI describes its own look in one phrase: “since 1949, our yellow and black helicopters” have carried passengers, its history page says. That colour pairing is the one visual fact the company states about itself, and it is why this guide uses a yellow and a near-black — in tones of our own choosing, not taken from any PHI aircraft or file.

The business grew in two directions. In 1981, according to both English Wikipedia and the company, Petroleum Helicopters created an aeromedical arm, now PHI Air Medical; the company says it became an independent business unit in 2013. Vertical Magazine reported in November 2019 that PHI Group Inc. had three business units: PHI Americas in Lafayette, PHI International in Nelson, New Zealand, and an air medical unit in Phoenix, Arizona. By the 2024 anniversary release, the company described its brand family as PHI Aviation, its global energy-services division; PHI Air Medical, its US air ambulance provider; Helipass, a logistics service; and PHI MRO Services, its maintenance, repair and overhaul division.

Abroad, PHI says it formed PHI Century in Ghana with Century Aviation in 2012, PHI Americas in Trinidad and Tobago in 2015 and PHI Australia in 2016. English Wikipedia says it bought the offshore business Helicopters (NZ) from HNZ Group in October 2017. A company release of June 2022 set out three regional units — Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe, Middle East & Africa — with the Asia-Pacific headquarters in Perth and the EMEA headquarters in the Greater London area, and closed the former international office in Nelson.

The fleet page lists types from Bell, Airbus, Leonardo and Sikorsky. For offshore work it names the Sikorsky S-92A, which PHI says joined its fleet in 2004, when it was the first commercial launch customer; the AgustaWestland AW139; the Leonardo AW189 ER, from 2025; and the Airbus H175 and H160, both from 2024. The company says Airbus and PHI launched the H160 in the United States together in 2021, and its home page counts 213 aircraft.

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.

Chapter 11 in 2019, a new Houma base in 2025.

PHI’s recent corporate history runs through a court-supervised restructuring. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 15 March 2019, English Wikipedia says, and Vertical Magazine reported in November 2019 that it had emerged in September. PHI’s own timeline describes 2019 as a restructuring process, and its investor page lists tax statements for the September 2019 reorganisation and for later warrant adjustments, the most recent dated February 2026.

Since then the company has invested in its Louisiana hub. In October 2022 PHI said bp had extended a 10-year, multi-aircraft contract for full-time Sikorsky S-92 support from its Houma base, after 40 years of work for that customer. In May 2025 it opened a new Houma airbase with a 26,000-square-foot passenger terminal and a 40,000-square-foot hangar, the company said. Its maintenance division, launched in 2022, became a Sikorsky-authorised customer support centre for the S-92 and S-76C series in 2023, according to PHI.

Today’s website frames PHI around energy services, MRO and medical transport, with operations it says stretch from North America to Latin America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. The history page also lists a long run of firsts — among them, it says, being the first commercial helicopter operator to log one million flight hours — which are the company’s own claims.

For a design guide, PHI shows how a regional oilfield name can shrink to three initials and a fixed colour pairing while the business beneath it widens. Compare Era Group, the Alaska and Gulf operator founded a year earlier, and Airbus, maker of the H175 and H160 in PHI’s fleet. For this guide we use a signal yellow and a near-black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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