'I live with the guilt of not doing more' – The Leicester City helicopter tragedy and the stories of those affected

Warning: This article contains details of the helicopter crash at Leicester City’s King Power Stadium in October 2018 that killed the five people aboard. Some readers may find the testimonies of those who witnessed the events distressing.

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“The flames started to take towards the rear of the aircraft and it was at that point I realised that the people (inside) were going to die.”

Police Constable Stephen Quartermain then broke down on the stand as he was giving his witness account at the inquest into the fatal helicopter crash outside Leicester City’s King Power Stadium in 2018.

It has been more than six years since Quartermain and Sergeant Michael Hooper, who were both awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for their actions that night, were the first emergency services personnel on the scene. They arrived minutes after the helicopter had crashed in the car park outside the ground, shortly after taking off from the centre circle of the pitch following a Premier League game between Leicester and West Ham United.

But the trauma of what both witnessed remains, after they desperately used their batons and a fire extinguisher that October night to try to break the reinforced glass of the aircraft’s windscreen to get to the five people inside.

The futility of their attempts quickly became apparent as they were beaten back by the intensity of the rapidly developing flames.

There was nothing they could do. There was nothing anyone could do to save pilot Eric Swaffer, aged 53, co-pilot Izabela Lechowicz, 46, and passengers Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, 60, Nusara Suknamai, 32, and Kaveporn Punpare, 33.

They died quickly, the inquest heard this month during seven days of evidence. While all suffered injuries to their lower spines and some to their heads, four of the five could have survived had the helicopter not landed on a half-metre-high step, before toppling onto its left-hand side. The impact fractured the on-board fuel cells and their contents ignited, engulfing the aircraft in an inferno.

Lechowicz, who was also Swaffer’s partner, died instantly from chest and head injuries.

Postmortem evidence showed the others would have been quickly consumed by the smoke and fumes, though the details of what happened were deeply distressing to many of those present at the inquest.

There were five fatal victims of the tragedy on October 27, 2018, but many more who saw the events unfold, and the deceased’s friends and family, are still suffering. The Athletic was present at the inquest and these are the stories of those who witnessed what occurred that day.

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The families’ wait to find out more about how their loved ones died has taken so long chiefly because the Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) report involved extensive investigation of every moving part of the tail rotor controls suspected of being the reason the helicopter spun out of control.

The Covid-19 pandemic delayed the AAIB’s work as laboratories were shut down, but it has been an intolerable length of time for those affected.

“Waiting for the inquest has been tormenting, leaving many unanswered questions and frustrations lingering for over six years since the tragic loss of our Eric and Izabela,” Kate Lechowicz, sister to Izabela, said in a statement before the inquest.

Finally, 16 months after the AAIB report was published, the inquest began at City Hall in Leicester and the witnesses relived those traumatic moments.

It was clear how difficult it was for many to give their evidence.

PC Quartermain told the inquest how he initially thought he saw arms and legs moving in the back of the helicopter. Swaffer, still strapped into his seat, seemed unresponsive but then came around and pleaded with the two policemen: “Help. Get me out. Help me.” The words still haunt the officers.

That evening, Hooper and Quartermain were heading back to the stadium after helping deal with post-match disorder at Leicester’s train station. They were being told to stand down just as Hooper spotted the helicopter spinning in the air and saw it crash to the ground. He and Quartermain then hurried to the site.

“I looked at the helicopter and where it was positioned, and I could see that there was a brick wall (the step mentioned above) so we were already lower than it,” Hooper said.

“I looked towards the top, to see whether I could access the door on the right−hand side, as it would have been on the top, but it was too high. I then went and looked under the left-hand side, and where the helicopter landed, it had buried itself into the ground.”

However, the injuries to those inside meant they would not have been able to get out unaided anyway. At that point, Hooper drew his baton.

“I was anticipating it (the windscreen) was going to be hard like glass, and it’d start to smash,” he told the inquest. “It just bounced off and was repelling my baton every time.”

Hooper then tried a fire extinguisher from his patrol car.

“I had the same thought that I didn’t know how long it was going to be before it completely went up,” he added. “Whether, whilst we were there, it was going to explode or anything like that, so I was very conscious of that.”

Still, the two officers tried.

“As I’ve looked into the aircraft, there is just a wall of flames between the front seats and the rear,” Hooper said. “I couldn’t tell you what was behind, but I could still see the pilot was in the seat, and I essentially wanted to buy him a bit of time before we could get other emergency services with us.

“I’ve thought, ‘Well, I’m not sure what this is going to do’, but I could see that the pilot was still alive at this point, so I ran to where the nose is and where the aircraft had grounded. I put the fire extinguisher underneath it, sprayed it and I could see the powder going in forwards, but it was just evaporating.”

Their brave efforts were futile, and the fire had spread.

“Unfortunately, I could hear the pilot — whether he had come out of his initial dazed state — shouting, ‘Get me out of here, help me’.”

Hooper was asked if he stood by his initial statement, that there was no sign of Lechowicz next to Swaffer, and his answer revealed how long he and Quartermain had been living with the trauma:

“Yes, I could not see anybody in that seat, and I’ve thought about that for a long time as well.”

There were other witnesses, who the officers shouted at to stay back as the intense heat also forced them to retreat.

Among them was Leicester’s director of football Jon Rudkin, who was one of the last people to see all five alive.

He had accompanied Srivaddhanaprabha, the club’s owner and known to all there as Khun Vichai, and his staff to the helicopter moments before, as he usually did after a home game. Sometimes he also accompanied Khun Vichai.

This time, he recalled to the inquest how Khun Vichai was the last to board the aircraft, shaking his hand as he did so. He waved and gave his usual ‘thumb-up’ gesture to Rudkin as they lifted off.

Rudkin described how there was nothing unusual about the helicopter’s ascent out of the stadium at its south-east corner, how it stopped climbing and turned right to start the 78-mile (125km) journey to Stansted Airport, north of London, where Khun Vichai’s jet flight back to his native Thailand was waiting.

It became clear something was terribly wrong, though, when the helicopter started to spin. Then it kept spinning. It began to descend, still rotating wildly, and disappeared from his sight.

Rudkin ran down the players’ tunnel to his car in the stadium’s front car park and drove through the crowd of fans still milling about post-match. He told the inquest he didn’t know whether the helicopter had travelled beyond a group of nearby trees or even had landed in among them.

Puchong Masayavanij, Leicester’s assistant club secretary, had also accompanied the party to the helicopter but had gone back into the tunnel. He described how the club’s first-team goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel ran past him, shouting, “Did you not see that? The helicopter has gone down!” as he headed outside and towards the aircraft.

While giving testimony on day one, Rudkin had to stop to compose himself as he was asked about Khun Vichai’s work with the club and what he had done for the city of Leicester. Khun Vichai bought the club in 2010 and they had been surprise Premier League title winners six years later. After his death, they went on to win their first FA Cup in 2021 with his son, Aiyawatt, taking over as chairman. “He gave everybody the ability to go and achieve that possible dream. That was Khun Vichai,” Rudkin said.

Darren Pyke, a sound engineer for UK broadcaster BT Sport, which had shown the game live on TV that Saturday evening, was packing his equipment into his car. He heard a noise, looked up and saw the helicopter spinning.

It came down in an area of wasteland.

While control of the aircraft in that moment would have been impossible, Swaffer was praised by the AAIB for doing everything he could in the circumstances. “How they managed to get it into that bit of wasteland, I don’t know,” Pyke said.

“Our conclusion was the pilot had done everything in his power to try and avoid or correct the situation he found himself in,” Mark Jarvis, principal inspector for the AAIB, told the inquest. “There was no contribution from the pilot whatsoever to this accident.”

Pyke started running towards the scene before turning back to get his phone so he could use its torch function. He didn’t know, in the darkness, if the two white images he could see were the pilots’ shirts or seats, but he noticed a foot-high flame emerge towards the rear of the helicopter.

Fearing an explosion, Pyke told a figure who appeared on the nearby steps to back away. He believed that person to be Leicester’s then-grounds manager John Ledwidge, who had watched the helicopter take off from behind the pitchside advertising hoardings, then hurried down their groundsmen’s tunnel in the south stand when he saw it begin to spin.

Ledwidge, now employed by Manchester City, was training to become a fixed-wing pilot at the time and would regularly discuss aviation with Swaffer. He started to run towards where he thought the helicopter was about to come down.

“I immediately shouted at my team to take cover, because I didn’t know if it was coming back into the stand or if it was going to land on the (stadium’s) roof,” he told the inquest.

Ledwidge, who was close to Khun Vichai and the Srivaddhanaprabha family, got to within 15 metres of the downed helicopter and saw the flames develop. This also made him concerned for a young groundsman, named only as Nathan, nearby.

“It had become more about trying to protect the staff,” he added, his voice cracking as he said he still struggles with the events he witnessed.

“I sort of live with the guilt of not doing more… when the fire started, I then switched my preservation of life to my team and the people that were trying to help, and I should have called for one of my guys to call the emergency services.”

Another member of club staff was Martin Wicks, a member of Leicester’s maintenance team. He had been fixing an issue in the away dressing room when he saw the helicopter spin out of control. He reached his car parked outside the stadium when he heard a sound above.

“We went into fight or flight mode to get Nathan (the young member of ground staff who was on a nearby lighting rig) out of the way,” he said. “Nathan made his way towards John and myself in a very emotional state, and then I consciously continued to watch the helicopter come into a landing position in the waste ground. But my main focus at that moment was Nathan.”

Wicks said the landing of the helicopter was “quite controlled” and that he thought he saw movement inside. He approached to within 10 feet just as the first flames appeared. “For some reason, I made my way back to where the flames were,” he said. “In our heads, it was to try and help, but I don’t know why I did it.”

Unknown to Wicks, he was now covered in aviation fuel and therefore in serious danger, but he informed the police officers of the fire and was ordered to retreat, stopping to help another distressed witness, goalkeeper Schmeichel.

“A member of the security team came over, because Kasper Schmeichel was on his knees in the car park,” he recalled. “We’ve made our way over to him to pick him up.”

As Wicks retreated, more emergency services were on their way. Fire crews arrived within five minutes, although it took considerably more time to extinguish the flames. It was then confirmed that all five people on board had died.

Rudkin was trying to reach Khun Vichai’s son, Aiyawatt, by phone to tell him what had happened but the time difference back to Thailand (Bangkok is seven hours ahead of the UK at that time of year, so it was early hours of Sunday there) made it difficult to make contact.

It was not just the Srivaddhanaprabha family who would wake up to devastating news that morning.

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An inquest is not designed to establish blame or guilt, but to establish four facts — who died, when, where and how.

The when and where in this case are clear. The how part of the inquest covered four of the seven days, with evidence given by representatives from the AAIB and several companies.

The companies were Sloane Helicopters, which maintained the aircraft involved for Khun Vichai’s firm Foxborough Limited; Leonardo Helicopters, which built the particular model the victims were travelling in; SKF Aerospace France, which made a duplex bearing used in the tail rotor that became integral to the investigation; Microtecnica, manufacturer of the tail rotator actuator, which also featured in these proceedings; and Shell Aviation Limited, which produced the lubricant used in the tail rotor bearing.

The AAIB found in its report, which was eventually published on September 6, 2023, that there was a seizure in the duplex bearing, which is designed to keep in place the tail rotator actuator, connected to a control system for the pilot to alter the pitch of the rear rotors so they can be moved to change the direction of the helicopter, while allowing the rear rotor system to turn.

The actuator began to spin because of this seized-up bearing, eventually detaching it from a nut that connected it to the rest of the control mechanism.

This meant the rear rotor, which balances the torque of the main rotor to stop the fuselage spinning in the opposite direction of the blades, was actually applying more torque, making the helicopter uncontrollable.

The Srivaddhanaprabha family said last month that they have filed a £2.15billion fatal accident claim against Leonardo S.p.A., the aircraft’s manufacturer. Leonardo has stated it will defend the claim.

In a statement released after the inquest, the Italian company said: “As the jury recorded, the helicopter had all the relevant airworthiness certificates. This is entirely consistent with the evidence provided to the inquest, that the helicopter was designed and produced in accordance with all regulatory requirements, meeting the accepted industry standard for safety.”

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That legal case lies ahead, but at the core of this inquest were the people involved — those lost and those left behind who are still coming to terms with what happened outside the King Power Stadium that night more than six years ago.

At the start of the proceedings, on the morning of day one, the ‘who’ part of the inquest took place.

A statement, accompanied by a video tribute to Khun Vichai, was read on behalf of the Srivaddhanaprabha family. “We feel the loss of him as much today as we ever have done,” it read. “He was a good man with a good heart.”

Punpare’s widow Pitchakorn sent a statement detailing how the loss had impacted her and their nine-year-old Pimpiporn: “Kaveporn was a kind, hard-working, compassionate person and he would take care of everyone around him and that’s why everyone loved him.”

The tribute to Suknamai was sent via email and ended by saying, “This is the greatest loss for the family, and we will never forget it up to the present days.”

But there was also a personal presence. Kate Lechowicz stood up at the inquest on the first day to read out the portraits of her sister Izabella and partner Swaffer, and spoke of a life they shared devoted to aviation and adventure.

Visibly emotional, she was asked if she needed a moment before she spoke, but she paid tribute to Swaffer, who had previously flown Britain’s Royal family: “He truly (lived his) life, living the dream (life with my sister) as they soared through the skies together. Forever loved and never forgotten.”

On her sister, she said her two-year-old niece had been named Izabela in her honour: “She is still dearly missed by so many.”

Swaffer was praised for his actions in trying to limit the damage of the inevitable crash by reducing the rotation of the main rotor to limit the spin, lowering the helicopter towards the open space and then trying to pull up on the collective controls before it came down to cushion the impact.

“We take comfort from hearing that there was nothing else that Eric could have done and he did everything within his power to control the helicopter and prevent the loss of life,” Kate Lechowicz said in a statement after the inquest.

The Srivaddhanaprabha family attended on the final two days of summing up and deliberations — Khun Vichai’s widow Aimon, Khun Top, who is the youngest of their four children, his older brother Apichet and sisters Aroonroong and Voramas.

Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, with his mother Aimon, who is holding a photo of her husband Vichai outside court (Joe Giddens/PA Images via Getty Images)

With Aimon clutching a photograph of Khun Vichai to her chest, Philip Shepherd KC, who represented the Srivaddhanaprabhas at the inquest and is expected to do so again in the civil action, spoke on behalf of all the family, who gathered behind him, outside City Hall after the accidental death verdict.

“My father trusted in the design of this helicopter,” he said on behalf of Khun Top. “It was Leonardo’s responsibility to make sure the helicopter was safe. It wasn’t safe. It was a death trap.”

Just minutes before, inside court, coroner Professor Catherine Mason had sympathised over the length of time it’s taken for the bereaved to finally get some clarity regarding the tragedy. “To the families, I would say it’s been a long journey to get the answers the families wanted as to how your loved ones came to their death,” she said. “I hope through this inquest you have had a voice.”

Answers may have been found that bring some solace, but the grief and the trauma will go on for those involved.

As will the legal action when the lawsuit begins and then the wounds will be reopened again.

(Top photo: Getty Images)