Shetland helicopter crash: Ships to get oil workers Oil giant Total has chartered four vessels to take North Sea workers back to the mainland, as the industry faces unprecedented challenges in the wake of the Sumburgh Head helicopter disaster. After an emergency meeting last night, oil chiefs said it would take "industry-wide collaboration" to combat the impact of the grounding of all Super Puma flights in the wake of last Friday's crash, which left four people dead. CHC, operator of the doomed helicopter, said all models of the aircraft would remain grounded until the company had gained a "clearer understanding" of the cause of the tragedy. Britain's most lucrative industry is facing increasing calls for a total boycott of all Super Puma flights and for the entire fleet to be scrapped. Representatives of 80 of the biggest companies operating on the UK Continental Shelf met in Aberdeen to consider ways of dealing with the mounting backlog of crew-change flights. Total, which had chartered the Super Puma involved in the crash off Shetland, confirmed it had hired vessels to pick up offshore workers due to return home from various platforms in the North Sea. A spokesman said the French oil company had chartered four vessels but declined to give further details. Malcolm Webb, chief executive of industry body Oil & Gas UK, said the sector was facing an "unprecedented" challenge in logistics and restoring the confidence of the workforce. He said: "The industry met today to set in train appropriate actions to address the operational consequences of the current situation. The Super Puma helicopter fleet represents over 50 per cent of the capacity in the North Sea. The immediate knock-on effects of this are delays and flight backlogs with considerable inconvenience to the workforce and their families, and potential adverse effects on offshore activities. Our primary concern is assuring the safety of the workforce. The Helicopter Safety Steering Group (HSSG), which met on Saturday, recommended that flights of each of the various models of Super Puma helicopter should only resume when sufficient factual information to support this decision becomes available. Today's meeting endorsed that position. Mr Webb added that the industry would need to take significant action to negate the impact of the grounding of the fleet. He said: "Individual operators have contingency plans in place for when flights are suspended due to bad weather, for example, but preparing for a wider or potentially longer-term issue will require industry-wide collaboration." But he insisted helicopters remained the safest method of transport for offshore workers. There are lots of problems around marine transport, particularly as the weather gets worse. But if this situation persists, it's inevitable there will greater resource to marine transport," he said. The crash claimed the lives of Sarah Darnley, 45, a catering steward from Elgin; Gary McCrossan, 59, from Inverness; Duncan Munro, 46, from Bishop Auckland, and George Allison, 57, from Winchester. Duncan Trapp, vice-president for safety and quality at CHC Helicopter, promised the crash would be "painstakingly investigated" and that his company would work with the authorities and give its full co-operation. CHC announced an indefinite grounding of its entire Super Puma fleet, but Mr Trapp said it still had no concrete evidence about the cause of the tragedy. "We keep an open mind," he said. It is still too early and, with the investigation under way, it would be wrong to speculate in any way. The factors under investigation will be environmental, technical, maintenance and human factors. Together, the regulators, authorities, aircraft manufacturer, CHC and other experts will painstakingly investigate the incident to determine - and learn the lessons of - what went wrong. He added: "It is understandable that emotions are raw at the moment among the offshore workforce. They are understandably concerned and we fully appreciate that. My message and commitment to offshore workers and everyone with an interest in our industry is that we will continue to do everything humanly possible to ensure we get them to work and get home safely every time. Until we have a clearer understanding of what caused the incident, we will continue to hold all flights of [Super Puma models] AS332 Ls, L2s and EC225s in the UK, in accordance with HSSG's recommendations. Yesterday, as the bodies of three of the offshore workers killed in the crash arrived in Aberdeen from Shetland on a passenger ferry, the government's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said a special update on the tragedy could be published "within the next few days." Keith Conradi, the chief inspector of air accidents, said that once investigators had recovered the black-box flight data recorders from the wreckage, they would be flown to the AAIB's headquarters at Farnborough as soon as possible. He said the AAIB had deployed a team of 12 personnel, including administrative support, to work on the investigation, along with colleagues from the Civil Aviation Authority . Mr Conradi said: "We will look at all the evidence and we'll be looking to see if there are any safety deficiencies, and if there are, we'll be making safety recommendations just as soon as we find that But he went on: "We will look at it with fresh eyes and go where the evidence leads us. It [the North Sea] is a very demanding environment. Members of the senior management team from Eurocopter, the French manufacturer of the Super Puma, have arrived in Aberdeen to assist in the joint investigation by Police Scotland and the AAIB. A spokesman for the helicopter company said: "At this point in time, limited technical information is available regarding the cause of this accident. Eurocopter's experts are in Aberdeen working closely with the investigation authorities to determine the cause. Meanwhile, calls for a total boycott of Super Puma flights are growing. A Facebook page calling for the Super Puma fleet to be "destroyed" has attracted more than 30,000 supporters. And an online petition has been launched, calling on helicopter operators, oil companies and industry bodies to address the concerns of the North Sea workers over helicopter safety in the wake of the latest tragedy. David Learmount: Grounding Super Puma is sensible - but it will fly again There are more than 800 Super Pumas in service across the world. The RAF had them in service in the early 1970s, and since then the Super Puma has seen some pretty good and varied service across the world, and it has been a pretty good workhorse for the oil and gas industry. Over its lifetime, and generally speaking, its safety record has been excellent. If you were to look at the Super Puma over its lifetime of service, it has as good a safety record as any other helicopter carrying out the same sort of task. But, if you were to look at the past four years, that would not be true. And we have to ask questions about why these incidents did not happen before and are happening now. However, you cannot get a helicopter which is as safe as an airliner - besides which, they are operating in such an unfriendly environment in the North Sea. Helicopters are phenomenally - I cannot overemphasise this - much more mechanically complex than fixed wing aircraft. And the more bits you have doing mechanical jobs in a device, the more you are going to get mechanical problems happening from time to time. However, I do not think this latest accident had the same cause as the crash in April 2009, in which 16 people died. If the cause had been the same - catastrophic gearbox failure - nobody would have survived this incident either. The helicopter in Friday's incident would have been flying at about 1,000 feet. Yet most of those on board survived, and some did not even need to be taken to hospital for treatment. Those who died, I suspect, did not die from the impact. The cause was something different. It might be gearbox-related but it was not catastrophic. Would I fly on a Super Puma right now? The answer is no, and I am not a nervous flier. But, as soon as I find out what caused this latest accident, then I will fly in one of them again. The point is that the Super Pumas have not been grounded because they are the absolute pariahs of aviation and will never fly again. They have been grounded because they don't know what caused this incident and they are not going to fly again until they know what did cause this accident. And that is only sensible. David Learmount is operations and safety editor at Flightglobal magazine.