Northern Shield Helicopters continues to soar Supplied by Transwest Air
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lot has changed over the past 50-plus years for Northern Shield Helicopters. But what hasn’t changed is the safety, reliability and service that Northern Shield Helicopters delivers. The company continues to deliver and serve its customers with an experienced crew that brings value to the customer. Northern Shield Helicopters is the rebranded rotary division of Transwest Air and has been delivering helicopter services across Canada for over 50 years. The company started with a Bell 47G and continues to maintain a Bell fleet ever since that first helicopter. In July 2016, Transwest Air and Northern Shield Helicopters were purchased by Westwind Aviation. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Westwind Aviation. Westwind Aviation is 87 per cent Aboriginal-owned and 13 per cent employee-owned. Northern Shield Helicopters is very proud of the majority First Nations’ ownership of the company. Northern Shield’s six high-tech helicopters transport people and/or cargo to the most inaccessible locations. They support a wide variety of industries – taking oil and gas seismic crews their equipment to exploration site; delivering mining employees to drilling locations to assess development viability; and taking firefighters and their gear, along with water bucketing, to areas and communities suffering from forest fires. They also rescue people in medical distress from isolated spots – where planes can’t land – and deliver them to the nearest health facility. As well, our
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407 line of helicopters has served the Heli-skiing industry during the winter season. The Northern Shield fleet is provided by Bell Helicopters, which is one of the largest helicopter manufacturing companies in the world. The fleet contains one Bell 206 light category units (capacity of four passengers and up to 1,000 pounds), one Bell 206L4 unit (capacity of six passengers and up to 1,400 pounds), two Bell 407 intermediate category units (capacity of six passengers and up to 2,500 pounds) and two Bell 205 medium category units (capacity of 14 passengers and up to 4,000 pounds). The qualities associated with Northern Shield Helicopters are consistent with those of Transwest Air. This is a company whose fixed wing segment (on wheels, skis and floats), for example, is not only the largest in the province, containing over 20 diverse planes, but has provided reliable, safe and efficient flights (both scheduled and chartered, carrying passengers or cargo and for personal or corporate use) for over 60 years. It is the forward thinking of the company that led to the creation of a redesigned passenger/cargo combination aircraft to service the needs of the communities it serves in Northern Saskatchewan. For more information about Northern Shield Helicopters, you can contact Marcus Lorenzen, chief pilot and director of flight operations, at (306) 764-1404 or mlorenzen@nsheli.ca. Visit our new website at www.northernshieldhelicopters.ca. 6