Colin McRitchie who was onboard MV Subsea Discovery, the ship that recovered Nimrod XW666 in August 1995 and has kindly supplied me with the following photographs of the recovery operation.

	SAR Sea King from Lossiemouth keeping a watchful eye on the recovery. It was a helicopter like this one that plucked XW666's crew from the sea within seconds of the ditching. Does anyone have a copy of the news film showing the ditching?
Close-up showing the reason for the ditching. A serious engine fire started in the starboard wing. The pilot was returning to Lossiemouth (the runway was in sight) but felt it safer to ditch the aircraft as the fire was weakening the wing and there a considerable risk of structural failure leading to the loss of the aircraft and crew.
Click on the photos to enlarge

Colin gives us more details of the recovery operation:-

"The ships name which was used for the recovery operation was the MV. Subsea Discovery.

The Discovery had been a cable laying vessel owned by BT, Subsea Offshore (Now Subsea 7) took her on what they call 'Bareboat Charter' because she had twin diving bells and chambers for saturation diving (ie not air diving, but using a combination of helium/oxygen) The divers can be kept at working pressure in the chambers or 'working depth' so there is no need for them to decompress every time they come back to the ship from the seabed.

The tail section was removed completely first, it was almost off anyway after the fuselage cracked aft of the wings. The wings were then cut off to accommodate the main section of the fuselage on the ships deck. To be honest I can't really remember how long the whole operation took but I think it was in the region of 10-14 days. We had really great weather at the time which made it easier.

The frame which was used to lift the main fuselage was made at Nigg offshore fabrication yard and transported to us via a barge.

We also recovered a couple of skips worth of bits from the seabed.
The plane ditched only a few miles from the end of the runway at RAF Lossiemouth with Lossiemouth being visible in the background of one or two images. My cousin's husband was in the RAF and had actually worked on the aircraft before it took off on her final flight, I believe a fuel pump failed on one of the Starboard engines and that was the start of the fire, you can see on one of the photo's a half moon shaped burn in the trailing edge of the wing."

Thanks Colin, very interesting, Jim.