Bristow Helicopters Flight 56C was a helicopter flight that flew between Aberdeen and the Brae Alpha oil rig in the North Sea. On 19 January 1995, the AS 332L Super Puma

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

operating the route, registered G-TIGK and named ''Cullen'', was struck by lightning. The flight was carrying 16 oil workers from

Aberdeen Aberdeen (; sco, Aiberdeen ; gd, Obar Dheathain ; la, Aberdonia) is a city in North East Scotland, and is the third most populous city in the country. Aberdeen is one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas (as Aberdeen City), and ...

to an oil platform at the

Brae oilfield The Brae field is a Scottish oil field. The name comes from a Scots language word for hillside. The field was discovered in 1974 by well 16/7-1 drilled by a semi-submersible rig Odin Drill for operator Pan Ocean. The Fields are operated by T ...

. All 18 people on board survived.

Crew

The commander of the flight was Cedric Roberts (44). He had been with Bristow Helicopters Ltd since 1974. He was a very experienced pilot with more than 9,600 hours of flying time under his belt. The first officer was Lionel Sole (39). Sole had been with Bristow Helicopters Ltd since 1990. He had more than 3,100 hours of flying time to his credit.

Accident

En route, the helicopter ran into poor weather and was then struck by

lightning Lightning is a naturally occurring electrostatic discharge during which two electrically charged regions, both in the atmosphere or with one on the ground, temporarily neutralize themselves, causing the instantaneous release of an avera ...

. This caused severe damage to the

tail rotor The tail rotor is a smaller rotor mounted vertically or near-vertically at the tail of a traditional single-rotor helicopter, where it rotates to generate a propeller-like horizontal thrust in the same direction as the main rotor's rotation. Th ...

. Though the helicopter managed to limp for a few more minutes, the tail rotor eventually failed completely and the pilot was forced to perform an emergency

autorotation Autorotation is a state of flight in which the main rotor system of a helicopter or other rotary-wing aircraft turns by the action of air moving up through the rotor, as with an autogyro, rather than engine power driving the rotor. Bensen, Ig ...

onto the rough seas. Emergency floaters on the helicopter allowed the passengers and crew to be evacuated onto a

life raft A lifeboat or liferaft is a small, rigid or inflatable boat carried for emergency evacuation in the event of a disaster aboard a ship. Lifeboat drills are required by law on larger commercial ships. Rafts ( liferafts) are also used. In the m ...

. Despite the high waves and bad weather, all the people on board the flight were rescued by the ship ''Grampian Freedom''. The lightning strike was an isolated one in the storm, and may have been induced by the helicopter flying through the cloud. The accident investigation also revealed potential troubles with the

carbon fibre Carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (American English), carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers (Commonwealth English), carbon-fiber-reinforced plastics, carbon-fiber reinforced-thermoplastic (CFRP, CRP, CFRTP), also known as carbon fiber, carbon compo ...

composite material A composite material (also called a composition material or shortened to composite, which is the common name) is a material which is produced from two or more constituent materials. These constituent materials have notably dissimilar chemical or ...

with brass strip design of the rotors which made the rotorblades prone to explosion and damage from lightning strikes.

In popular culture

The events of Flight 56C were featured in "Helicopter Down", a

Season 3 (2005) A season is a division of the year based on changes in weather, ecology, and the number of daylight hours in a given region. On Earth, seasons are the result of the axial parallelism of Earth's tilted orbit around the Sun. In temperate and po ...

episode of the Canadian TV series '' Mayday'' (called ''Air Emergency'' and ''Air Disasters'' in the U.S. and ''Air Crash Investigation'' in the UK and elsewhere around the world).

References

External links

Crew

Accident

In popular culture

See also

References

External links