Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many commercial helicopter flights to offshore oil and gas installations on the UK Continental Shelf were cancelled due to storms (a) Dudley, (b) Eunice and (c) Franklin.
Neither the Department for Transport (DfT) nor the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) hold this information. As North Sea helicopter movements are non-scheduled, operators do not provide flight data to the CAA. Only the operators themselves will know how many flights they cancelled or postponed because of the three storms.
Flight operations in the North Sea are frequently subject to extreme weather conditions. Therefore, operators will have numerous standard operation procedures determining when they fly and when they don’t.