Leonardo, PHI, sign new support plan

The plan will bring PHI’s AW139 helicopter fleet under a ‘Powered-by-the-Hour’ (PBH) agreement, providing long-term maintenance support across PHI’s three main operating regions – the Americas; Asia-Pacific; and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

The agreement is intended to ‘mitigate cost uncertainty’ for PHI, and ‘standardize maintenance expenses that more directly correlate to flight hours’.

Leonardo stated that the new support plan would offer a ‘data-driven approach’, with benefits such as ‘better configuration control, a forecast of the fleet behavior, as well as an optimization of the overall asset management’.

It added that the plan would leverage the ‘recently established Diagnostics Service Tower, based in Sesto Calende, Italy’, and that it would ‘allow for real-time information about aircraft status and use, material service enhancement to best manage spares, analytics for data-driven training, and flight operation optimization’.

PHI currently operates a fleet of 20 Leonardo aircraft, including both AW109 and AW139 helicopters, used across the energy, search and rescue (SAR) and aeromedical transport sectors. One AW139 was leased from Milestone Aviation in October 2022.

“Leonardo has presented an innovative new approach to the legacy cost-per-hour agreements,” said Keith Mullett, Managing Director at PHI Aviation. “This new PBH agreement will not only help control costs but also improve material dispatch reliability, allowing PHI to continue providing safe and reliable aircraft for our teams, our passengers and our customers.”