HELICOPTER bosses apologised last night for the latest ditchings in the North Sea – but admitted they still don’t know what caused them.
Eurocopter chiefs held an “open and honest” discussion at a helicopter safety steering group in Aberdeen yesterday where they told leading industry members they were sorry.
They also promised to rebuild the industry’s confidence in their brand after two ditchings this year led to the grounding of dozens of Super Pumas in the UK.
That move is costing the firm millions of pounds.
But last night Lutz Bertling, the chief executive officer at Eurocopter for the last six years, said it would be at least three months before the full fleet was flying again.
Not all Super Pumas include the defective equipment and some are still airborne.
Speaking in Aberdeen, Mr Bertling said: “I felt the need to come here as CEO of the group because of the concerns that have been created here and the lack of confidence that is existing today in our company. Honestly, in the history of Eurocopter in the last 20 years we have not had a technical issue on any product which has had such a severe impact on different stakeholders like this one.
“It is our responsibility to fix it and we are very sorry for it.”
Although Eurocopter bosses believe the ditching of the CHC-owned EC225 last month was almost identical to an incident involving a Bond helicopter in May, it will still be around four weeks before tests can confirm what happened.
An initial bulletin, issued by the Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB), reported that a crack in the main gear shaft had been discovered after the helicopter carried out a controlled ditching. A warning light indicated a failure of the main gearbox lubrication system and triggered the crew’s response.
Eurocopter now believes the warning light was set off in error – as happened at the time of the ditching of the Bond helicopter in May. In both incidents all passengers and crew managed to escape safely into liferafts before being picked up.
Mr Bertling added: “The main point at the moment is finding the root cause of why this component is failing.
“Why is the component failing when the total Super Puma fleet has more than 4million flight hours, why is the component failing twice this year when the EC225 fleet has 250,000 flight hours without any occurrence before? What has changed in the shaft?
“Now the important thing is that we fix the technical issue. But even more importantly we need to regain confidence so that people can really feel reassured that the aircraft that they are sitting in is safe in operation.
“Our second objective is to then bring the aircraft back into service. We need to come back with safe and reliable solutions and this is why most likely – as much as we dislike it – the current inconvenience will continue for some time.
“The best guess which we have at the moment, based on the main hypothesis we have for the root cause, is that the aircraft will come back into operation around February.”
More than half of the helicopter fleet used to carry oil workers on and offshore is currently banned from flying over water.
As a result, companies have had to reduce the number of employees onboard their platforms as well as having to find alternative methods of ferrying their workers about.
Les Linklater, team leader of the Step Change and Safety Group, said after yesterday’s meeting, he said: “We appreciate people are being disrupted, we appreciate this may come at a time when people want to be at home with their families, but we don’t want to compromise safety for the sake of that.”
“We hope that the workforce will understand their wellbeing is ultimately our main priority in this.
“Oil and Gas UK is looking at contingency measures they can bring in to help the situation until we return to normal flight operations.”