Sycan Corp

Sycan Corp (doing business as Sinton Helicopters), a for-profit Subchapter S corporation headquartered in Paso Robles, California, operates as a prime contractor providing Type III helicopter services for wildland fire suppression, aerial firefighting, natural resource management, and search-and-rescue missions to federal land-management agencies—primarily the Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the Department of the Interior. The vendor competes exclusively full-and-open with no set-aside designations across most of its work, though two of its four standing indefinite delivery contracts carry total small business set-asides.

Sycan's customer concentration is heavily weighted toward wildfire management. The Department of Agriculture Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management National Interagency Fire Center dominates activity with 44 awards (47% of the vendor's prime award count) worth $97.2 million in combined potential value, reflecting the seasonal nature of fire-suppression contracting. The Department of the Interior's Interior Business Center ranks second in dollar value ($56.7 million across 7 awards) as administrator of the vendor's largest standing IDIQ, followed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Northwest Region (9 awards, $10.1 million) for exclusive-use helicopter support in Bemidji, Minnesota and Billings, Montana. The National Park Service Pacific West Region places the highest award count after NIFC (18 awards) but carries the lowest dollar value ($409 thousand) through small on-call mission orders for helicopter flight services at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California. Together, these top five customer components represent 98% of the vendor's combined potential value.

Sycan holds four standing indefinite delivery contracts anchoring its federal footprint. The Type 3 Helicopter Support Services 2023–2032 contract with the National Interagency Fire Center carries a $40 million ceiling and supports 13 task orders worth $8 million in combined potential value; this multiple-award vehicle runs through December 2028 and funds fire-suppression operations at bases in California, Idaho, Montana, and Minnesota. The On-Call Type III Helicopter Flight Services 2022–2027 IDIQ under the Department of the Interior's Interior Business Center carries a $49.5 million ceiling with a total small business set-aside; 7 awards against this vehicle total $56.7 million and include the most recent delivery order (May 15, 2026) for snow telemetry missions at Missoula, Montana ($381,679). Two legacy single-award IDCs (awarded November 2021 through March 2022) carry smaller ceilings ($1.5 million and $3.5 million each) with ultimate completion dates in 2022–2023, now substantially expired. Task orders under these vehicles are consistently firm fixed-price with economic price adjustment provisions where noted, reflecting the vendor's pricing certainty model in service to agencies budgeting fire-season resources. Individual delivery-order ceilings range from under $5,000 for short-duration search-and-rescue flights to $3.28 million for extended fire-suppression seasons.

Award activity shows a sharp peak in 2023 (26 awards) followed by significant decline—2024 brought 5 awards, 2025 yielded 2, and the source captures only 1 award in 2026. This collapse in order count reflects the expiration of legacy IDC vehicles and the vendor's transition to delivery orders under the two primary standing contracts (Type 3 HSS and DOI On-Call). Twelve awards carrying combined potential value of $2 million face ultimate completion in the next twenty-four months, presenting limited recompete exposure; the largest of these is the May 15, 2026 snow telemetry order ($381,679) already performed by that date.

Sycan operates exclusively as a prime contractor (100% of awards); no sub-award activity appears in the source. Across SCI-reportable federal service contracts (those above the $150,000 threshold and capturing labor-hour delivery), the vendor invoiced $6.1 million over FY2022–FY2024: $2.3 million in FY2022 (4.9 FTEs), $2.8 million in FY2023 (3.5 FTEs), and $1 million in FY2024 (1.7 FTEs). The FTE decline tracks the award-count collapse and reflects the vendor's reliance on seasonal fire-suppression contracts with concentrated year-end-of-performance clustering. On federal services contracts captured in SCI, median government-paid rates ran around $294.96 per hour, with senior labor pricing through $596.24 per hour and entry-level rates around $188.91 per hour, reflecting a mix of pilot, maintenance, and support-crew labor. The vendor reports zero subcontractor hours on its SCI-reportable prime contracts, indicating integrated delivery and no feeder-contractor model. Sycan's footprint is driven entirely by helicopter operations (NAICS 481211 — Nonscheduled Chartered Passenger Air Transportation dominates with 78 awards) and forest-fire-suppression missions (PSC code for fire suppression accounts for 46 awards), with negligible diversification into other service lines.

Helicopter charter and utility operations