FAI: No amount of safety procedures could have saved heli crash victims
NO PRECAUTIONS could have been taken to prevent a North Sea helicopter crash which claimed four lives, a fatal accident inquiry found.
Two crew members and 12 passengers on the Super Puma L2 survived when it ditched on its approach to Sumburgh Airport in Shetland in August 2013.
But Sarah Darnley, 45, from Elgin, Gary McCrossan, 59, from Inverness, Duncan Munro, 46, from Bishop Auckland, Durham, and George Allison, 57, from Winchester, Hampshire, died.
Survivor Samuel Bull took his own life in London in 2017, which Sheriff Principal Derek Pyle said was “directly caused” by the crash.
The inquiry found that the safety barriers, which were in place, did not manage to prevent or remedy the pilot’s “one failure” to maintain the correct speed as the helicopter approached the airport.
An Air Accidents
Investigation Branch (AAIB) report published in 2016 found the pilots failed to properly monitor flight instruments and also failed to notice their speed was decreasing until it was too late to stop the chopper plunging into the sea.
Following the FAI, Sheriff Principal Pyle said the crash happened because the commander failed to maintain the target approach speed of 80knots.
He wrote: “If he had done so, the helicopter would not have reached the critically low energy state from which recovery was impossible.
“That is where ultimate responsibility rests.”
He said there was “plainly no wilful neglect” on the part of Captain Martin Miglans, describing him as a “pilot of huge experience with a first-class record of flying over many years”.
However, he said: “Rather, there was, as one witness described it, a perfect storm of circumstances which resulted in all the safety barriers in place not preventing, or remedying, his one failure, to maintain the correct speed.”
The sheriff principal said there were no precautions which could reasonably have been taken that might realistically have resulted in the deaths, or the accident resulting in the deaths, being avoided.
He also praised the “exemplary conduct” of co-pilot Alan Bell – both in the seconds before the crash and in his efforts to save the survivors, “but for whichch others would almost certainly have died.”
Mr Pyle also said thatt while helicopter trips inn the North Sea are moree perilous than general flights by fixed-wing aeroplanes, they are a “safe means of transport”.ort”.