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Working for a no win, no fee compensation company does not make you a ghoul hoping for personal injury to befall people, so it shouldn't be surprising that talk in the office this morning about the eighteen people rescued from the wrecked helicopter in the North Sea is entirely positive about the happy ending to the story.
We were fascinated with trying to find out how it happened though; the majority of what we deal with in terms of crashes is car accidents and whiplash injury, so a helicopter going down is one of those situations that's close enough to what we do to be properly interesting while distant enough to be a little exotic. It's also interesting in that the people on board were on board as part of their jobs - that makes it a work accident, another of our specialities, but - again - an unusual one compared to what we normally deal with.
If you've missed the news, the story is this; fifteen oil workers and three others (at least one of whom must be the pilot) were in a Super Puma helicopter flying between Aberdeen and the BP oil platform out in the North Sea when it suddenly began to descend quickly. When it crashed into the sea, airbags inflated outside the aircraft, so that it floated and lifeboats were released so that the people inside could escape, which they did.
It would be nice to say that there was no personal injury at all, but that's apparently not true - three of the people on board had to go to hospital, but all were described as "walking wounded", which makes it sound like whatever injury they received was minor.
The managing director of the off-shore platform said it was too early to say what the issue was that had caused the accident; it also appears that the people on the aircraft were debriefed before speaking to their family, which might explain some of the mystery we're dealing with.
There is a tiny film at the Guardian website which shows the footage taken by the rescue helicopters, which just about shows the downed craft in the freezing water - it's in the same grainy infra-red type imagery that films use to make things mysterious, so it's just adding to that effect.
Even that chilly water didn't manage to affect the passengers too badly as they were all issued with appropriate protective gear that saved them from hypothermia. It's reminiscent of the Hudson plane crash a while back - we were happy about the relatively safe landing there, too.
In many ways, it would be nice if the world managed to make it to a state where no win, no fee compensation firms like us were no longer needed, but that may be an impossibility - judging by another story in the news at the moment, it looks like law firms around the country are bringing new personal injury lawyers on to their teams as compensation claim numbers rise.
We'll hope that you're not someone forced to join those compensation numbers through a car crash, work accident or anything similar - please cross your fingers for us too?
