Three Gulf of Mexico hurricanes in quick succession during September and October have again illustrated the difficulties confronted by offshore helicopter operators serving energy platforms in the region when it comes to rapid personnel evacuations and post-storm repopulations.
These weather events often press operators of the more than 200 Gulf-based helicopters to their limits, triggering operational tempos that are two to three times the norm of nearly 800 daily flights, according to data from the Helicopter Safety Advisory Conference (HSAC), an organization formed in 1978 to address rotorcraft safety in the Gulf.
That task is complicated by the fact that operators often must relocate their helicopters, support equipment and personnel to makeshift bases further inland in heavy weather, as well as having to face wide-sweeping airspace restrictions due to the establishment of large weather reconnaissance areas (WRAs) as storms approach.
WRAs are usually set at 15,000 feet and below with a 200-mile radius around a set of coordinates. These are typically the center of the storm, but can be anywhere along or adjacent to its path, including terminal areas (Class D airspace) and any other airspace within 50 nautical miles of the shoreline of the continental United States (CONUS).
Notification of a WRA and its effective hours are made by the FAA via notices to air missions (NOTAMs). Air traffic services are not provided to non-participant aircraft in the WRA. Participant aircraft typically belong to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who fly a pair of P-3 Orion turboprops and a Gulfstream IV, and the U.S. Air Force Reserve’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, which flies 10 specially-equipped Lockheed Martin WC-130Js based at Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi.
The reconnaissance aircraft’s tasks include measuring the storms’ dewpoints, temperatures, winds and pressures using stepped-frequency microwave radiometers, dopplers and dropsondes.
Important work to be sure, but the size and duration of the WRAs mean that helicopter operators and their customers need to evacuate platforms well in advance of the storm’s arrival, often when the weather is easily flyable, especially with larger helicopters.
That compounds already stressful operations, according to Jacob Braden, pilot and operations director for the Bristow Group. At any given time, Bristow is operating 70 to 80 helicopters from eight bases in the region, spread across Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. It is a mixed fleet that skews toward medium, super-medium, and large twins: Leonardo AW139s and AW189s, Sikorsky S-76s and S-92s in the main, but it flies a few Airbus AS350 series and Leonardo AW119 singles, as well.
“A lot of the time we’re still able to fly when tropical storm force winds are encroaching, but the area has been blocked off by a WRA,” Braden said. “We could operate within 24 hours of [the storm’s] landfall.”
But because of WRAs, Gulf operators need to start depopulating platforms as soon as 96 hours before landfall, according to HSAC. At any given time, there are between 9,000 and 12,000 personnel on Gulf platforms, so moving them quickly is no small feat.
Difficult under the best of circumstances (when storms come off West Africa and “we can get in front of it, it’s a little easier to predict,” said Braden), but in the case of Hurricane Milton and other storms that form quickly off the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf, operational demands accelerate.
Milton strengthened from a tropical storm on Oct. 5 to a Category 5 hurricane in 24 hours. It made landfall near Siesta Key, Florida, on Oct. 9 as a Category 3 storm, knocking out power to 3 million Floridians and shutting down an estimated 24 percent of the Gulf’s oil-and-gas production. It came less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene hit Florida’s Big Bend region and then traversed with torrential rains that spawned record flooding through Tennessee and North Carolina.
Helene forced the evacuation of 17 oil and gas platforms in the U.S. Gulf, shutting down 29 percent of oil and 17 percent of gas production in the area. (The entire Gulf is home to 371 manned platforms according to the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement or BSEE.)
Helene hit after Hurricane Francine reached Louisiana on Sept. 11, causing widespread flooding. It also triggered platform evacuations, with Shell depopulating its deepwater Perdido, Auger, and Enchilada platforms in anticipation of that storm. All three of those platforms are located some distance from shore: Perdido 120 miles, Auger 255 miles southeast of Houston, and Enchilada 112 miles south of Vermilion Bay, Louisiana.
Over the last three decades, the trend for Gulf energy producers has been to go far, deep, and big, and these super platforms require large crews. Perdido alone is home to 172. Braden estimates that 65 to 70 percent of Bristow’s Gulf business is servicing deepwater platforms.
“It’s rare to see something less than 100 miles [offshore] for a crew change aircraft,” he said. Some missions are as long as 220 nautical miles, one-way. “It’s nothing to fly 60 to 70 miles without seeing a single facility, [with] nothing but ocean out there,” said Braden. “We’ve combatted that with conservative weather minimums, but we still have to deal with issues including poor communications, minimal landing areas, and limited fuel sources.”
“It’s a huge undertaking to get those folks moved” on short notice, Braden said of the super platforms. This particularly applied to recent storms, when huge WRAs were thrown up with very little notice — but Braden doesn’t fault the FAA for doing so.
These are large storms “and they need to investigate it,” but it sometimes “takes away our opportunity and our window to get evacuations done,” added Braden. “They block out a wide surface area that we can access.” That area can be as large as 165,000 square miles.
Aside from the WRAs, there are commercial and logistical factors that add to the difficulty factor. “The way [helicopter] companies work now, everybody wants long-term contracts,” said Braden. “Historically, throughout the Gulf, helicopter operators stay pretty lean. We don’t keep a lot of spare aircraft sitting around. That forces you to fly the aircraft a lot more. You just don’t have the spares. We stay pretty busy. It’s nothing to have 30, 35 crew changes a day with our aircraft [that are based in the Gulf during normal operations].”
There is nothing normal about a Hurricane evacuation. “It’s all hands on deck,” Braden said. Energy companies use a combination of crew boats and helicopters to get the job done, but with fast-moving and violent storms the slower boats can be hampered by large sea states.
Bristow’s Gulf flight crews work a 14 days on, 14 days off schedule, but hurricanes can tear this to shreds. Many pilots who fly the Gulf live in Florida, Braden noted. When a hurricane is on the horizon, some must leave early to secure family and property while others who are off can’t return on time for the same reason.
Then there’s the “nightmare scenario” wherein once a storm exits the Gulf it slams into one of Bristow’s own bases. The company has detailed contingency plans in place to deal with this, including base evacuation and relocation with elements that encompass moving aircraft, parts, tools, supplies, and personnel and arranging support for them to temporary bases.
One is located in Conroe, Texas, north of Houston. Aircraft are relegated to different temporary bases by type. “That way the maintainers and the tooling, tugs, tow bars and all that are somewhat organized,” Braden said. Bristow’s temporary bases are spread out to accommodate this and simply as a matter of prudence — there aren’t any single airports in the region that can accommodate the company’s entire Gulf fleet. And even if there were, it’s not a good idea in the face of a hurricane or punishing tropical storm. Plans are annually reviewed prior to hurricane season.
Against this dynamic are the needs of the customers, who typically evacuate non-essential crew, such as those performing regular maintenance, first, and those who turn off the valves to shutter the rig last. “They want to make sure they have enough time to get their folks off safely, but still make a profit as long as they can,” Braden said.
And that includes getting platforms back on line as soon as possible after storms pass. That’s when the real fun begins. Platforms lashed with high winds are essentially “pressure washed” with salt water, noted Braden, and that can contaminate the Jet-A fuel stored in the platforms’ bowsers.
But the platforms must be powered up before the fuel can be checked. Until it is, repopulation flights are required to carry round-trip fuel, significantly limiting the capacity of helicopters flying out to the distant, deepwater platforms. “So normally you’re flying 19 passengers [in the S-92], but because of round-trip fuel, you’re flying only 13 or 14,” Braden points out.
If the fuel is contaminated it has to be offloaded via supply ship, professional fuel techs need to be flown out to change the filters, and then the fuel has to be replaced via another supply ship — and that can take a while. “If you can’t get a good sump, you’re sunk,” Braden said.
Another concern is communications. The platform-based system of VHF repeaters won’t work without electrical power and sometimes it is damaged by high winds. Bristow does use the Iridium satellite system as well, but overall communications are limited until the repeaters are switched back on. ADS-B ground units on platforms also need power, but they typically only illuminate aircraft positions in the Gulf above 3,000 feet, and helicopter traffic there can typically fly between altitudes of 600 and 700 feet during overcast conditions.
Then there is the question of duty time. When helicopter bases are temporarily relocated inland, it increases the commute time for pilots and cuts into the duty hours that can be used to fly passengers, at times by as much as an hour or hour and a half a day.
Not surprisingly then, the repopulation process can take longer than the evacuation flights.
Braden said operators and the government are engaged in dialogue to find a solution to the problems posed by WRAs, including limiting their size, launching more weather flights at night, and allowing for more flexible hours to accommodate Gulf operators, who fly mostly in daylight. Discussions are ongoing, but “hurricane hunters” require a wide berth as they discharge dropsondes (weather devices) and can have sketchy communication with air traffic control while being bounced around in a storm. “We haven’t found the perfect solution — yet,” said Braden.
