Air accident report returns over Super Puma 225 crash

The accident is being blamed on metal fatigue in the gearbox

Published 28th Apr 2017

A new report into a fatal helicopter crash off the coast of Norway has been published today.

It's almost a year to the day that 13 people, including Iain Stuart from Laurencekirk, died in the SuperPuma 225.

The aircraft they were flying in grounded off the coast of Bergen.

We now know for sure that it was metal fatigue in the gearbox that caused the helicopter to crash.

That means it's very similar to the North Sea tragedy in 2009 - which was also caused by a catastrophic gearbox failure.

In that incident there was a warning sign that something was wrong beforehand - it doesn't look like that was the case here.

We do know the gearbox was involved in a road accident before being fitted, but there's no evidence that's what caused the fatigue

The fleet is currently still grounded, and that decision has the support of the Offshore Coordinating Group who say workers have lost faith in this model of SuperPuma - after a number of accidents over the years.