Eighteen people were rescued with only minor injuries after their helicopter ditched in the North Sea while trying to land on an oil platform last night.

The coastguard compared the rescue in dark and icy waters more than 100 miles offshore to the “miracle on the Hudson”, when Captain Chesley Sullenberger brought down an airliner on the Hudson River last month without anyone on board being injured.

The Super Puma helicopter ditched into the water as it approached the platform just before 7pm yesterday. Workers on board the installation saw it go down about 500 metres away and immediately raised the alarm.

The helicopter was carrying civilian workers to an oil platform in the Etap (Eastern Trough Area Project) field, a complex of reservoirs operated by BP and Shell, 125 miles east of Aberdeen. It was owned by the BP subcontractor Bond Offshore.

An RAF helicopter and a Nimrod surveillance plane were scrambled to assist three civilian helicopters and the platform’s standby vessel with the rescue. All 16 passengers and two crew were recovered after they were spotted in the helicopter’s liferafts, floating one or two miles southeast of the field’s main Marnock platform.

Flight Sergeant James Lyne, at RAF Kinloss, said that the helicopter managed to land upright and stay above the water thanks to flotation bags, which inflated on impact. “It was all very quick. Within a few minutes of the aircraft ditching we had rescue aircraft on route,” he said.

“The big danger is if it is high seas because then the aircraft will land and turn upside down.”

Fred Caygill, a spokesman for HM Coastguard, said: “It is absolutely comparable with the Hudson River and it may well turn out that the pilot’s expertise contributed to saving all those lives. We are all very pleased.

“Three flares were spotted by people on the platform. This helicopter had ditched about 500 metres away from them and they could see the fuselage on the surface and then they saw the flares. If someone has fired a distress flare, it tells you they are alive. Distress flares don’t fire automatically.

“All people were picked up from two liferafts, which were ‘rafted’ together, tied together.”

Another coastguard spokesman said: “The reports that we have are that [the casualties] are traumatised and they are cold, but they are walking wounded - in other words there are no major injuries reported among any of the 18.”

He explained how the passengers were winched to safety. “The difficulty was in rescuing all the people from the liferaft. Three had been brought up in one of the helicopters, but the down-draught from the helicopter then caused problems for the liferaft down below.”

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