Engineer forgot about problem with helicopter
AN aircraft engineer ‘completely forgot’ to tell his bosses about a possible problem he found with a helicopter just hours before it crash landed on a North Sea oil rig.
The Sikorsky S92 had been taking workers to the West Franklin wellhead when the captain and co-pilot lost control of the tail rotor, causing the aircraft to spin and drop on to the deck.
Such was the impact it gouged marks in the metal surface, and stopped perilously close to the edge with nine passengers and two crew on board.
Experts believe that if the incident had happened earlier in the flight then the aircraft would ‘most likely’ have plunged into the sea.
An investigation has now found the engineer had been called away from work after police alerted him to an attempted break-in near his home. Police noted that during their meeting he seemed ‘upset and showed signs of distress’.
He then returned to work and found an ‘anomaly’ during safety checks but failed to flag it up.
After word of the accident the next night got back to the helicopter base in Aberdeen the man was called in to explain his lack of action.
An Air Accident Investigations Branch (AAIB) report published yesterday stated: ‘He arrived at work upset and distressed, realising his mistake, recalling that he had completely forgotten to inform his supervisor of the Health and Usage Monitoring System graph anomaly the night before, as he had intended. He immediately informed the managerial staff what had happened.’
The investigation into the incident, which took place on December 28, 2016, found a bearing in the tail rotor had ‘degraded and failed’.
As a result, the tail rotor was receiving ‘uncommanded and uncontrolled inputs’. The AAIB said the contributing factors made this a rare event during a routine offshore flight.
Its report stated: ‘In the latter stages of landing, yaw control was lost completely and the helicopter yawed to the right.
‘The crew landed the helicopter expeditiously, but heavily, on the helideck. The helicopter continued to rotate to the right and the crew closed the throttles before it came to rest near the edge of the helideck. ‘There were no injuries.’ The report said the impact of the landing gear had caused a ‘dent in the top layer of the helideck’, part of which was a 3in (80mm) ‘cut’ which penetrated the surface. Aircraft operator CHC acknowledged two safety recommendations made to the European Aviation Safety Authority.
They include researching more ‘timely’ data capture in relation to safety systems as well as amending regulations to allow for ‘real time’ warnings for flight crew in relation to similar technical failures on board the aircraft.
A CHC spokesman added: ‘We introduced a number of measures to strengthen the detection of impending degradation.
‘We are confident the measures we have taken continue to underpin the safety and airworthiness of the Sikorsky S-92.’
‘Landed heavily on helideck’