Offshore helicopter operators appear to be gravitating back towards fleets featuring a mix of heavy and super-medium types as supply chain challenges previously afflicting the Sikorsky S-92 have begun to ease, according to leading lessor Milestone.
Pat Sheedy, chief executive of AerCap-owned Milestone – marking its 15th anniversary on 28 August with a new brand identity – says market feedback over the last two years was that operators were “worried about having some single-source aircraft”.
That was a response to a shortage of main gearboxes for the 19-seat S-92 – a mainstay of offshore operations where high capacity or long range are needed – leaving high numbers of airframes idle and awaiting parts.
Concerns about “exposure to the S-92” led to a “flood of exuberance around movement towards super-mediums, maybe a bit faster than they would otherwise have thought”, he says.
“But now the S-92 has come back to relative stability in terms of its availability and utilisation, I think people are coming back to the thought that a mixed fleet may not be a bad thing.”
Additionally, operators now have a much more balanced view of the capabilities of super-medium helicopters like the Airbus H175 and Leonardo AW189 against those of the S-92, says Sebastien Moulin, chief commercial officer at Milestone.
“Everyone loves the idea of having new technology aircraft coming in, but when you first look at the numbers in terms of aircraft availability, they are not showing much better availability than the heavies,” he says.
On top of which, they are not like-for-like replacements, he argues: “You need more than one super-medium to support the same mission as an S-92.”
Moulin says several tenders from the oil and gas industry are expected in the coming months that “are expected to bring back a mix of super-mediums and heavies rather than just super-mediums”.
“We are coming back from the buzz of ‘we need the new tech at any price’ to ‘we need the right solution for the mission’,” he says.
But that does not mean the adoption of super-medium helicopters has slowed, more that the process is continuing in line with forecasts of a “slow and steady” pace as older S-92s are retired from offshore use.
Indeed, Milestone has financed four of the less than 10 super-medium deliveries made into the segment in the first half of 2025.
In the meantime, the lessor continues to prepare the ground for accelerated S-92 replacements later this decade, developing secondary markets for the heavy-twin.
It has already had some success with a firefighting version, which features a 5,000-litre (1,320USgal)-capacity Helitak belly tank; US certification for the modification was achieved in 2024.
Two examples are now in service with VIH Group in Canada and had, as of 18 August, racked up 695 flight hours and completed 5,889 water drops.
Feedback from VIH has been “very positive”, says Moulin, “so we are very, very confident about the future”.
Sheedy says that although Milestone does not anticipate a scramble for alternative uses in the short-term, they need to be ready “in advance of the [S-92] roll-off that is coming” from 2026 onwards.
He expects “double-digits” of the Helitak-equipped helicopter to be in service by the end of the decade.
In addition, Milestone is working with Sikorsky to increase the type’s utility transport capabilities, largely through the incorporation of a cargo hook.
Sheedy points to Milestone’s prior experience in the field, having successfully found new homes for the 27 Airbus H225s on its books when the type was pulled from the oil and gas sector after a fatal crash in 2016.
Although the AW189 and H175 are the only super-mediums currently in service – type certificates were received in 2014 and 2015, respectively – a third contender, the Bell 525, is slowly moving through the certification process.
Milestone has previously been cool on the 525’s prospects, feeling that “it missed the boat on the super-medium wave” but that view may have softened slightly, hints Sheedy.
“I think, bizarrely, they are so late with the aircraft that they may now start to pick up the retirement phase of the S-92, whereas previously they would have been head to head against the S-92 with an expensive aircraft.”
Airbus and Leonardo are also “significantly escalating” the prices of their super-mediums, he asserts, meaning that the previously “unbridgeable” price gap between those helicopters and the 525 is “starting to tighten”.
“So, I don’t think it’s as black and white a case as it might have been historically that the aircraft wouldn’t have been competitive for those reasons.”
While he retains concerns over whether Bell can sell sufficient numbers of 525s to sustain the programme, if the airframer can clear the certification hurdle, deliver its initial batch of 10 aircraft to Norwegian customer Equinor, and produce a helicopter that matches the performance promised “I think maybe the case for the 525 isn’t as negative as I would have thought previously”, he adds.
Elsewhere, Moulin promises progress soon on placing the six medium-class H160s Milestone has in its orderbook.
“I think you’ll see us working on different projects and hopefully making some nice announcements [shortly] around the H160 picking up some work… across different regions in oil and gas.”
The offshore segment represents about 60% of Milestone’s business, with the emergency medical services sector accounting for the remainder.
That remains steady, says Moulin, with “long-term, reliable contracts”, albeit that the stability is offset by the management time required to transition those assets to a new role at the end of the lease.
“You can end up in a position where it takes six months, 12 months to reconfigure the aircraft and deliver it to the next lessee,” he says.
As one of the first large-scale operating lessors in the helicopter market, Milestone’s history and evolution parallels that of the wider segment, and includes its enduring a painful downturn over the last five years of the previous decade.
“The sophistication and the experience of all the players in the industry has changed a lot and we have moved towards a relatively stable model of how an operating lease works,” says Sheedy, who has been with Milestone since February 2015.
“We have learned a lot in that intervening period – 2015 to 2020 – and that has served us well in terms of how we approach the market today.”
And, he says, the data accumulated over its 15 years of operation provides another advantage: ”That really allows us to hone our decision making as we move into the [next] phase of industry maturity.”
