PHI’s Broome Base in Western Australia recently celebrated its five-year anniversary. The base has come a long way since a small team set up the operations in 2017. Initially, there were 41 employees and two aircraft at the base—this has now grown to 95 employees and seven aircraft.
Some of the successes of the base include:
- June 2017 – transition to support full Inpex contract
- November 2017 – PHI won the Search and Rescue Medevac services contract to support Inpex and Shell in the Browse Basin
- April 2018 – full all-weather search and rescue aircraft arrived at the base
- April 2020 – base relocation from several small hangars into a large hangar
- September 2020 – arrival of the Leonardo AW139, the first for PHI’s operations in Australia, which was also used to assist with distribution of Covid-19 vaccinations to remote communities
- September 2021 – SAR operation moved from sub-contract arrangement to a full complement of inhouse crew
- September 2021 – Introduction of SAR Cadetship
Over the past five years the base has achieved:
- 21,758 flight hours
- 90,885 passengers transported
- 4972 offshore flights