"Please, Don't Leave Me"

You would resolve to never, ever place yourself in a potentially vulnerable, psyche-altering situation like that again. The fearsome gloom settling over one's consciousness, wakening from a brief unconscious state to discover that the worst possible scenario had unfolded. As the helicopter ride that you'd undertaken countless times before suddenly ended far short of its destination. In flight off the Newfoundland coast, over the ocean en route to the Hibernia oilfields.

Hibernia, the first offshore oil project on the Grand Banks, began pumping crude in November 1997.

A Cougar Helicopters Sikorsky S-92, a reliable sky-beating contrivance carrying you and seventeen others, including the flight crew. What could be more yawningly familiar? Yes, there is always the knowledge shared by all who make those trips that disaster could somehow descend on them. And for that reason people in those situations are equipped with disaster suits designed to help them survive that worse-case scenario.

In the catastrophic worst-case scenario that ensued on a routine flight east of Newfoundland on March 12, 2009 of the helicopter carrying workers to the White Rose oilfields at Hibernia, there was but one survivor. When Robert Decker testified before an enquiry into offshore safety, he explained the miracle of his survival: "Also, when I regained consciousness in the submerged helicopter cabin I know that I stayed calm and I didn't panic.

"I was able to concentrate on getting out of the helicopter and to the surface as quickly as possible... It was like a reflex to take a breath and to hold it and to stay calm until I could get to the surface." His previous 50-such trips, as a weather and ice observer for Provincial Aerospace, must have in some sense prepared him for such a possibility. So when he awakened inside the destroyed aircraft cabin, the light from his survival suit guiding him, he undid his seatbelt.

He pulled himself through the shattered window beside his seat, took a long breath as the helicopter kept filling with seawater and continued sinking, then began his long ascent, noting increased brightness as he ascended toward the surface. Floating on the water with his suit beginning to leak, his hands cramped and frozen, body temperature descending, his vision failed through the stress his body was succumbing to.

He was fortunate. So weak that he was unable to scramble into a rescue basket when a search helicopter hovered over him, he said to his rescuer who was lowered to assist him, "Please, don't leave me." This is misadventure writ large. And this is also pure, blind luck. Representing ample reason why one individual who suffered the anguish of such an experience vowed never to repeat it.