Maltese oil workers shaken by latest helicopter crash

Maltese oil workers felt a mixture of relief and horror on Wednesday when, soon after stepping off a helicopter in Scotland following a three-week stint on a rig, they found out that a similar chopper had just crashed into the North Sea, the second such accident in just under two months.

One of the workers who spoke to The Times, but preferred not to be named, said he had disembarked from a Bond Super Puma helicopter following a one-hour flight when he found out that a similar helicopter had crashed while ferrying workers to BP's oil fields about 270 kilometres off the Scottish coast. All 16 on board, 14 passengers and two crew, died.

On February 18, another helicopter, an identical model, came down in similar circumstances. However, in what was hailed as a near miracle, all 18 people it was carrying, including four Maltese oil workers, had survived and were rescued.

"It's very scary. My colleagues and I thought to ourselves: Third time unlucky... What if it's us next time," the 37-year-old oil worker said.

The father of two does not work with oil giant BP but his oil exploration company also uses Bond helicopters and operates in the North Sea.

Like BP, he said, his company has assured workers that they will no longer be using the Super Pumas to transport workers to and from the rigs.

The workers, from all over the world, are lured to the dangerous environment by the substantial wages paid by the lucrative oil industry. "But it's incidents like this that remind us that there is another price, and that's the price in human life, which has been played out over the years," the worker commented yesterday.

BBC reported that eight of those who died on Wednesday came from north east Scotland, with the others from Angus, Dundee, Dumfries, Cumbernauld, Liverpool, Norwich, the West Midlands and Latvia.

The 15 people named by Scottish Grampian Police were aged between 24 and 63. One person has still to be named.

The helicopter was returning from BP's Miller field when, just before 3 p.m., Aberdeen Coastguard were informed that it came down, the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency said.

The BBC reported that Bond helicopters decided to immediately suspend all passenger flights using Super Pumas.

An official report into the February incident found that a warning system that would have told pilots they were close to the water in foggy conditions had failed to sound.

The Super Puma has been involved in a number of incidents over the past 20 years, AFP said.

Eleven men died in February 1992 when a Super Puma taking oil workers from Shell's Cormorant Alpha platform to a nearby barge crashed into the sea immediately after takeoff, 100 miles northeast of Shetland.