Helicopter Crash Victims Rescued 'in Good Spirits'

Fifteen oil workers from a Super Puma helicopter which ditched near a North Sea platform off the Scottish coast arrived at a port "in good spirits".
They were among 18 people rescued last night after the helicopter plunged into the sea around 125 miles east of Aberdeen while on the way to a BP production platform.

Three others with minor injuries were flown to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary before being discharged overnight, and a boat carrying the rest of the passengers and crew docked in Aberdeen at around 5.30am.

A spokesman for BP said those on board were in "good shape" and their "spirits were high".

The cause of the accident was not yet known, she told Sky News, adding: "We want to pay tribute to the people who helped us in this incident."

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch is launching an investigation into what went wrong.

Coastguards described the rescue operation as "textbook", despite foggy and misty conditions out at sea.

The aircraft, with 16 passengers and two crew on board, went down at about 6.40pm yesterday, around 500m from the BP ETAP production platform.

A major search operation involving an RAF Nimrod, RAF Sea King, civilian aircraft and boats was launched as people on the platform raised the alarm.

Michael Coull, watch officer with Aberdeen Coastguard, said the aircraft landed upright with all 18 passengers able to be transferred to liferafts.

He said that none had been in the water.

Three of the passengers were eventually winched to safety by a Bond helicopter which arrived 40 minutes after the accident, while the other 15 were later recovered by a platform lifeboat and transferred to a vessel which made for Aberdeen.

Mr Coull said: "As far as we can ascertain this appears to have been a reasonably controlled ditching - there was no contact with the platform at all.

"From our point of view everything was carried out in a textbook way, if anything like this can be called textbook."