In August 2013, a helicopter crashed in the North Sea killing four oil rig workers. It was the fifth serious incident involving Super Pumas in as many years. Survivors talk about what happened
One day last August, Paul Sharp woke in his room on the Borgsten Dolphin oil rig. He had been on the night shift, then slept for five or six hours, so it was getting on for midday. He showered, dressed, then, after lunch in the canteen, packed his bags and took them up to heli admin to be weighed. Sharp has been a scaffolder on the rigs for nearly 23 years, working two-week blocks of 12-hour shifts, often in brutal weather: horizontal snow, screaming wind, icicles as tall as a room and waves that lapped at 75ft-high platforms. He commutes from East Hull, where he was born and now lives with his wife and daughter in a neat, low house facing a church and a main road.
The flight was running late, so Sharp went back downstairs to watch TV. When the call finally came, he returned to heli admin, a small room for a large and diverse bunch: the crew, plus 18 passengers, 17 men and one woman, working as safety officers, electricians, caterers, welders; old hands like Sharp, and those for whom the whole thing was still new, such as James Nugent, who had also just come off a night shift and was on only his second trip offshore. Nugent is a tall, well-built South African, weathered and emotionally open. After a career in the film industry and running a B&B, he became a rope access instructor, specialising in work at heights or in confined spaces. We talk in a restaurant perched on a point of land just outside Newquay in Cornwall, where he lives.