Craig Dobbin, the Newfoundland entrepreneur who built up a huge worldwide helicopter charter operation, died this past October at his home in Beachy Cove, near St. John’s where he was born on Sept. 13, 1935. CHC Helicopter Corporation is the largest helicopter services provider to the offshore oil and gas industry and operates helicopters in 30 countries.

Dobbin, who became by far the leading figure in the Canadian helicopter industry, had no early background in aviation. He was a successful real estate and development entrepreneur when, 30 years before his death, he bought his own helicopter, a used Hughes 500D, for personal use. He had been flying in a provincial government helicopter to remote fishing locations with his friend, Frank Moores (who died in 2005 and was premier of Newfoundland from 1972 to 1979). But he decided in favour of greater independence through having his own personal transportation.

But personal helicopters are expensive to operate and he looked for ways to make money from the machines. The provincial government was then developing a new public tendering act, and Dobbin won a commitment that the new contract for helicopter services would go to the lowest bidder. He sold his private helicopter at a profit, bought seven new Bell helicopters and a small Manitoba helicopter operator that had a commercial operating licence, transferred the licence to Newfoundland, and won the bid. He started under the operating name of Sealand Helicopters.

While never a helicopter pilot, the industry attracted his entrepreneurial interest with a vengeance. “I believe in forward motion and saw potentials elsewhere in the country. I wasn’t about to rest my laurels in St. John’s. We soon moved into the offshore market and also the international market,” Dobbin told HELICOPTERS Magazine in 1997. “In the mid-eighties when the helicopter industry was in a down cycle I started buying up companies to try and put a little stability back into the industry by being a common-source operator.”

With this visionary approach, Dobbin had by then snaffled 32 companies, notably Okanagan, Toronto and Viking Helicopters, to form what had become (in 1987) CHC.

When Dobbin spoke to HELICOPTERS at that time, he was doing so from a hospital bed in Philadelphia where he was recovering from major surgery – a lung transplant. It was complications from this that resulted in his death nine years later.

By the turn of the new milennium, CHC was so international that it was deriving only 12% of its revenue from Canada; 68% came from Europe and 20% from elsewhere. It had acquired Norway’s Helicopter Services Group (HSG), the world’s second-largest helicopter operation. This included not only North Sea offshore operators Helikopter Service A/S of Norway and Bond Helicopters of UK, but also Lloyd Helicopters of Australia and Court Helicopters of South Africa.

As one company history laconically notes, Norway’s HSG “unsuccessfully challenged CHC’s right to acquire a European Community company,” on the basis of EC citizenship requirements. HSG’s action was unsuccessful because “Dobbin had earlier become a national of Ireland on the strength of his historic ties to the country (and an endowment to the University of Dublin).” Dobbin’s Irish family settled in Newfoundland in the mid-18th century. That endowment was for one million pounds, to fund a chair in Canadian studies. Dobbin was later quoted as saying: “It was the best million pounds we ever spent. We made the company on the back of that.”

While consolidating internationally, CHC later spun off its domestic operations – charter, training, and repair & overhaul. In 2004 Dobbin shifted CHC’s headquarters from St. John’s to Vancouver – or, more precisely, to Richmond, the suburb where Vancouver International Airport is located.

On Oct. 6, 2006, CHC Helicopter Corporation announced that the founder and executive chairman of the company was taking leave of absence for serious health reasons and that 46-year-old son Mark, deputy chairman, would take on his father’s role during the leave.

The following day Craig Dobbin was dead at 71.