Chinook in the North Sea We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. ~Marcel ProustIt is excusable if you thought the Chinook was a warm wind that blew over the Canadian prairie, melting snows and raising temperatures. After all, that was what we learnt in geography at school, and few, if any of us, have had occasion to add another 'Chinook' to our vocabulary. But Boeing has been making a helicopter called the Chinook since about 1962. In fact, the Chinook-47 is perhaps unlike any helicopter you may have encountered either in real life or the movies, because it can carry up to 47 persons on board.
And for all but two of the 47 unsuspecting people who boarded the British Airways Chinook 234 on the beautiful morning of 6th November 1986, the hour of death was not in 'an obscure and distant future', but a scant four hours away. The two people whose survival was nothing short of miraculous were Captain Pushp K. Vaid VrC. and a 20-year old passenger Eric Morrans. Even today, when he recounts the horrific accident, there is amazement in Pushp Vaid's voice that he lives to tell the tale.
Captain Pushp Vaid was born in 1941, in what was later Pakistan. His family migrated to Delhi during the partition. He joined the Indian Air Force in 1963 as helicopter pilot, served for eleven years and was awarded the Vir Chakra in 1971 for his service in the Bangladesh War. In 1974 he migrated to the United Kingdom, where the helicopter industry was set to mushroom. He joined British Airways 9 months later and flew with them until 1993.
In November 1986, he survived the worst ever helicopter accident in civil aviation history. At the time, British Airways operated 6 Chinook helicopters for Shell, ferrying company personnel to and from oil rigs on the North Sea. Aberdeen, Scotland, was the oil city of the UK, with a lot of big oil companies based there and about 50-60 helicopters, along with the biggest heliport in the world. The Chinook 234 is large, about 2700 pounds, with a 21000 pound payload capacity. It is like an airliner, with headroom, luggage racks, a toilet, and inflight service! Helicopter pilots struggle with small payloads and limited fuel capacity; the Chinook was a helicopter pilot's dream – it could always carry the full 47-person contingent, enough fuel for over 6 hours of flying and it had very powerful twin engines. Even after the nightmare that the 1986 flight turned out to be, Pushp Vaid maintains that the Chinook will always be the best helicopter he has ever flown – and that is weighty testimonial from a pilot with 45 years and 17500 hours of helicopter flying behind him.
The Monday before the accident, Pushp had taken one of the Chinooks to Sumurgh, Shetland Island. He would operate out of Sumburgh for five days, heading back to Aberdeen on Friday evening. There were 2 sets of crews, one for the 2 morning flights to East Shetland Basin and one for the single afternoon flight. As they say, when someone's time is up, the whole universe unwittingly conspires to make it happen. First Officer Neville Nixon, who died in the accident, was not even supposed to be on the ill-fated flight. He had been allotted afternoon duty, but swapped with the morning crew since he was totting up flying hours, having been off flying for a year. Nixon was at the controls on the return trip, leaning forward a little in his seat rather than resting against its back. Nixon was killed by whiplash while Vaid, next to him, survived. Yet another bizarre twist of fate directed events that day. The original flight schedule was two stops – oilfields Brent Bravo and Brent Delta, and then back to Sumburgh. But Brent Alpha was unexpectedly included in the outgoing schedule, adding ten minutes to the flying time. The accident, which occurred a couple of minutes short of landing, would have caused no fatalities under the original schedule.
The outbound trip was uneventful, with not the slightest portent of what lay ahead. When Nixon took over for the return trip at 1043, the weather was sunny and clear. They quickly climbed to 2500 feet and switched to auto-pilot, chatting meanwhile of inconsequential things. After about an hour of flying they began the descent to 1000 feet, and then continued descending to 500 feet. Pushp Vaid contacted the company to give them the 'two minutes from landing' intimation which was routine. When they were 3.5 nautical miles from the runway, a whining noise became audible in the cockpit. It didn't sound dangerous and didn't worry the pilots. They were coming in to land; they would get it checked as soon as they landed. The noise was getting louder though and they wondered where it was coming from. Just then, the steward entered the cockpit to inform them that the passengers were strapped in and ready for landing. He immediately realised the noise was coming from above where he stood. That was the gear box. They were now roughly 300 feet above the water, speed was reducing to below 100 knots and they were cleared by the control tower to land. The steward went out, closing the door behind him; instantaneously there was an "almighty bang", and all of a sudden, Pushp Vaid was looking "straight up at the sky".
The whining noise had actually been the front gear (Spiral Bevel Ring Gear) breaking up. Once the gear broke, the front rotor began decelerating and it was only a matter of time before the two rotors, which intermesh as they counter rotate, collided, making a loud bang. The rear rotor and gear box broke away and fell into the sea, causing the rear of the helicopter to drop down (the two rotors work together to keep the body level) while the nose pitched up. The speed went from 100 knots to zero, causing whiplash. Half the passengers and Nixon probably died on the spot. When they retrieved Nixon's body from the bottom of the sea there were no other injuries on it apart from a broken neck.
The helicopter was now falling apart and dropping backwards into the sea like a stone. Pushp Vaid grabbed the cyclic control and pushed it all the way forward to level the helicopter, but only the front rotor responded; the rear rotor was gone. This flipped the cockpit section of the helicopter over so that the front and rear sections were now only attached at the floor, like a hinge. They were diving head first into the sea. The front rotor had broken part of the windscreen and debris was flying into the cockpit. There were cuts and bruises on Pushp Vaid's face, but no damage to his eyes or ears. When they hit the water, the rear end of the helicopter took the impact, and all the remaining passengers, save one, died of it. Eric Morrans, who was in the first row, sitting facing the rest of the passengers, had zipped up his survivor suit when he heard the bang. He lost consciousness under water. Air trapped in his suit shot him out of the water like a football.
Meanwhile, Pushp Vaid swam towards sunlight and surfaced. He was alive, and coherent, in his own words, "Not for a moment did I think that anybody was going to die!" But bodies started popping up all around him. He realised there were casualties but still didn't guess at their magnitude. He held on to what appeared to be a piece of the fuel tank and floated. His survival suit, which he had had no time to zip up, was full of water. The temperature of the water was about 7-8 degrees centigrade.
Luckily for Morrans and Vaid, the Coast Guard helicopter had just taken off for emergency training and the crew saw the debris in the sea. In fact, the guardian angel worked overtime for Morrans and Vaid that day. Morrans came to for a few seconds on surfacing right next to an inflated dinghy. He wrapped the rope of the dinghy around his wrist before passing out again. Vaid has no recollection of undoing his seat belts – they were found intact later, save one which had broken – but he still managed to get free and make his way up.They were winched up by the rescue helicopter, whose training mission had morphed into an actual emergency. As the coast guard searched for more survivors, Vaid and Morrans began to droop with hypothermia. When they reached the hospital at Lerwick, Vaid's body temperature had fallen to 32 degrees; another few minutes would have spelled death for him. They cut open the clothes of the survivors and wrapped them in tin foil. Vaid, his eyes still closed, heard a voice talking to him in Hindi, and wondered if he "had reached heaven"… by a strange coincidence the doctor to treat him was a fellow Indian. Apart from his brush with hypothermia, and a few cuts and bruises, Vaid had no injuries. The whiplash had only caused him a painful jerk. While the rear of the helicopter had taken all the impact, the cockpit had gone into the water as if from a 10 foot high diving board. A month later, when Vaid's wife insisted to him that his nose was crooked, the doctors found he had broken it; he had no recollection of the injury.
The mechanical failure that caused the gear box break was a one in a million chance. That it resulted in so many fatalities was a terrible orchestration of events. The Chinook was withdrawn from civil operation, though it is still popularly used in the military. Friends advised Vaid not to go back to flying. After all, the company would pension him off comfortably. But Vaid knew "money wouldn't fill the hours". Flying was all he had ever wanted to do. By February, he was ready to fly again. The company insisted on psychiatric checks however, and he resumed flying in April. He was 45 when the accident happened, and flew for another 20 years before retiring.
EXCERPT FROM WIKIPEDIAThe Sumburgh disaster was the crash of a Boeing 234LR Chinook helicopter on 6 November 1986 with a loss of 43 passengers and two crew members. The helicopter was on approach to land at Sumburgh Airport Shetland Islands returning workers from the Brent oilfield. At 2.5 miles (4.0 km) from the runway the helicopter had a catastrophic forward transmission failure which de-synchronised the twin rotors causing the blades to collide. The helicopter crashed into the sea and sank.
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