Helicopters carry people from shore to offshore installations and back. Modern helicopters are safer, more efficient and more useful than ever, and travel well and very safely for everyone who uses them.
A helicopter is a type of aircraft that flies using rotating wings called blades. Those rotors let it do things a fixed-wing aircraft can’t: it is faster, needs only a small landing area, can move straight up or down, take off and land without a runway, turn in the air, fly backwards or sideways, and hover in one spot.
Offshore especially, helicopter crews need special skills to operate in very difficult conditions — sea, mountains, weather, strong winds, rain, harsh and remote environments, tight spaces and more. Highly trained pilots and medical staff must stay alert under extreme pressure as they operate from small helipads to the offshore site of an incident. No one wants to take a helicopter in a dangerous situation, but there’s relief in knowing it’s available.
How helicopters help
- Natural resources: helicopters help us find, produce and conserve the resources we use every day — from inspecting power lines in remote areas to exploring for oil and gas, flying workers to offshore rigs, and helping forestry and mining companies monitor their assets.
- Medical transport: in use to save lives since 1972, helicopters carry accident victims and critically ill patients to hospital, handle emergency medical flights, and rescue people offshore, carrying the equipment needed to keep patients alive.
- Security, search and rescue: helicopters move supplies, run search-and-rescue missions, evacuate the injured and help disaster victims on land and at sea — searching the most dangerous places and bringing people to safety.
- Fire protection: a key aerial firefighting tool, especially in remote areas. Firefighters jump to wildfire sites from helicopters, which drop water on hard-to-reach fires. Some — “helitankers” — use internal tanks or a suspended bucket filled by dipping into the nearest water, and can fight fires even before ground crews arrive.
Helicopter accidents
For all their benefits, helicopters have downsides too — they can suddenly come down on land or at sea. Common causes include:
- Mechanical failure: failure in engine components, hard landings, cable damage, loss of control, impact on flat terrain, running out of fuel, or main- or tail-rotor drivetrain failure
- Pilot factors: inadequate pre-flight preparation, failing to see and avoid obstacles, poor in-flight decisions, and procedural problems
- Unsafe environmental conditions
- Weather
When a helicopter ditches into the sea, several things can happen:
- Capsize hazard: crew and passengers flying over water usually get less than a minute’s warning before they’re in the water. The helicopter then flips and sinks fast. It is very unstable in water and likely to capsize in waves over about 1.75 metres — floating upright, floating inverted, or sinking inverted. This happens often and is more likely to cost lives.
- Injury to occupants: once it sinks, occupants must get out through cargo doors, access doors, windows or the windscreen as water floods in — and may be thrown out through gaps on heavy impact. Escape is made harder by loss of vision in sudden darkness, disorientation, difficulty breathing underwater, and — most dangerous of all — confusion about the escape route.
- Injury during underwater escape: escaping after sinking is the hardest thing of all, with debris and lap straps hampering the effort.
- Hypothermia: in cold water the body loses heat faster than it can cope with, affecting the brain so the victim can’t think clearly enough to move safely.
Accident statistics
Some helicopter incidents from the past 40 years:
- The worst offshore helicopter disaster in UK waters was in 1986, when a Chinook travelling from the Brent oil field off the east of the Shetland Islands in the North Sea suffered a mechanical fault as two rotor blades collided. Two miles from its destination, Sumburgh Airport, it was carrying 43 offshore workers and three crew; the crash killed all but two on board.
- In April 2009, 14 passengers and two crew aboard a Super Puma AS332 L2 died after it crashed into the North Sea; the AAIB attributed the crash to a gearbox failure.
- In August 2013, a Super Puma crashed into the sea on approach to Sumburgh Airport in Shetland, killing four passengers.
- In April 2016, 13 people aboard a Eurocopter 225L Super Puma lost their lives in an explosion while travelling from the Gullfaks oil field to Bergen, Norway; the investigation found a main-rotor gear had failed.
The US Helicopter Safety Team (USHST) reported that, from 2016 to 2020, the US helicopter accident rate ranged between 0.68 and 3.75 percent. In 2020 there were 42 accidents, 9 of them fatal, with 21 people killed.
Underwater escape training
Escaping a helicopter crash should be a requirement for everyone working offshore. Workers need to know how to wear the right PPE so they don’t sink, how to protect their breathing underwater, and what to do before, during and after a flight — especially in and after a crash. They can learn and practise safe escape with Samson Tiara:
- Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET)
- Tropical Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (T-HUET) — by Samson Tiara and OPITO
- T-HUET with Emergency Breathing System (T-HUET with EBS) — by Samson Tiara and OPITO
HUET trains participants to react correctly and escape a helicopter sinking underwater, covering offshore helicopter operations, safety and survival equipment, escape procedures, evacuation, and techniques for getting out of an inverted, submerged helicopter. The one-day course leads to a qualification card and a certificate valid for three years. The OPITO-approved T-HUET and T-HUET with EBS courses add tropical-water and emergency-breathing content and carry a four-year certificate.
A highlight is the evacuation practice using the Modular Egress Training Simulator (METS™) on the surface and underwater — a realistic mock-up of the windows and doors used on offshore helicopters. Samson Tiara is OPITO-accredited to deliver these courses by Digital Delivery: study the theory online from any device, then complete the one-day practical at our Cilegon Training Centre. Read more about HUET, T-HUET and T-HUET with EBS.
