Bergen Crash
Could have happened to anyone...
Witness said: "It looked idyllic, absolutely by the book.
"As the helicopter came to land, I saw something that looked like a tarpaulin fly up from the deck and into the rotor blades.
"It went into a thousand pieces and everything was chaos. The pilot took off from the boat. The helicopter began to spin and landed on his back in the sea.
"It was over in five or six seconds.”
A loose fuel tank cover on the boat caused the crash, Norwegian investigators revealed today.
The metal sheet on the tank on the top deck of the £50 million Bacarella was sucked-up into the Ecuriel chopper’s rotors as it touched-down.
The pilot from HQ Aviation in Uxbridge, west London, tried to quickly take off again but his brand new £1.2 million aircraft plunged into the sea off Bergen on Wednesday evening.
The chopper, operated by a charter company in Uxbridge, West London, had set off from the Orkney Isles for the 200ft three-tier yacht which is on a world cruise.
Witness Jan Solberg, 33, saw the tarpaulin fly into the rotors.