The name Suggs has been at the heart of the offshore oil helicopter support business since its beginning, as intrinsic an identity as the Bell name is to the telephone (or helicopter) business or Edison is to electricity. That era ended last September when Carroll Suggs, wife of Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI) founder Robert Suggs and chairman of the board, CEO and president of PHI, stepped down from all those posts and sold her family’s majority interest in the company to Louisiana businessman Al Gonsoulin.
Robert Suggs founded what was to become the largest civil helicopter operator in the world in 1949 when the exciting new oil strikes being found in the Gulf of Mexico demanded development deep in the swamps and far offshore. Only the fledgling flying machine known as the helicopter could get there. In the years to come, offshore oil took off and so did Suggs’ fortune, his company growing until at one point in the mid-1980s it operated so many helicopters that only the rotorcraft fleets of the armed forces of the U.S. and the Soviet Union eclipsed PHI’s.
