A COUPLE rescued after their helicopter crashed in Lyme Bay a decade ago have been traced after an appeal.
Philip Burgess and his eight-weeks-pregnant wife Lisa crashed into the sea off Lyme Regis in thick fog in 1999.
They were left fighting for their lives in the freezing sea for more than an hour.
After a full-scale air and sea search, they were eventually found by local fisherman John Walker.
As the rescuers remembered the events of the day, they made an appeal in the Dorset Echo to trace the couple and their daughter Charley-Nicole, now aged nine.
After an anonymous reader emailed Charley-Nicole’s Buckinghamshire school, Mrs Burgess, now 39, got in touch.
Mrs Burgess, a banker, and property developer husband Philip, 47, have since had another child, eight-year-old Jack.
Mrs Burgess said the family, who live in Woburn, in Buckinghamshire, think about the ordeal every day. She said: “Not a day goes by when we don’t thank the rescuers, especially on the anniversaries. “Every year as a family we say a prayer. It is very much remembered, especially this year on the tenth anniversary.”
Newspaper reports at the time claimed Mr Burgess was a wealthy art dealer, and the couple were carrying valuable paintings in the helicopter while returning home from visiting his parents in Shaldon, Devon.
But Mrs Burgess said her husband was then an IT worker, and the two paintings were antiques for their home. Mrs Burgess remembers: “When we took off, it was so clear. Ten minutes into the flight it was still fine, then all of a sudden we were going around by the coast when this fog came out of nowhere.
“Phil climbed above it and you usually can go above it, find a pocket and keep flying, but this day, we couldn’t. When Phil radioed into Exeter they said there wasn’t a clear pocket anywhere.”
They sent a mayday to air traffic controllers and were told they would be brought into Exeter with instruments.
Radio operators then warned they needed to do a sharp turn to avoid the cliffs.
Mrs Burgess said: “That is the last conversation I remember with them. Then it all happened so quickly and before we knew it, we were submerged in water.”
The husband and wife managed to escape the wreckage.
“It then sunk in that we were in the middle of the ocean, we couldn’t see and we didn’t know how far out we were,” said Mrs Burgess.
The rescue itself is a blur to Mrs Burgess, who by that time was semi-conscious with hypothermia. Mr Burgess escaped with a broken arm and the couple’s baby was unharmed.
They returned to Lyme Regis to thank their rescuers and make donations of £11,000 to the RNLI and local fishermen’s association.
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