The pilots of an Agusta Westland AW189 commented on the unusual position of the crane on a North Sea platform but failed to note the platform’s name on the helideck before landing on the Forties Charlie (40C) platform, 1.8 nm (3.3 km) northwest of their intended landing site, the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) says.
In the final report on the March 25, 2019, event, released in early June, the AAIB said that the pilots believed that they were landing at their destination platform, Forties Delta (40D), and that “controls in place at the time proved inadequate to break the confirmation bias of the pilots” ̶ that is, their tendency to believe that the platform they saw was, in fact, the platform they were expecting to see.1
The two pilots and their four passengers were not injured in the incident, and the helicopter was not damaged.
The pilots’ preflight briefing included a discussion of the payload and the route for the planned six-sector fligh…
