Closing the book: a helicopter crash survivor reaches the end of his bucket list

The Celtic Tiger was in full roar on July 9th, 2005, and three close friends from Galway had hired a helicopter to travel to the Tall Ships Race in Waterford. They were on their way back when the helicopter crashed into a dense forest in thick fog.

The report of the air-accident investigation concluded that, “given the speed of impact, the high deceleration caused by the final impact with tree trunks and the light construction of the cabin of the helicopter, survival was unlikely”.

Yet Michael Gibbons did survive, although he lost best friends. Despite extensive damage, including brain injury, he has managed, painfully, to reconstruct his life. In a new book, Survivor, Gibbons details the battles he has fought since 2005.

The book is not a misery memoir, he says. “Everyone is faced with challenges and obstacles. My family certainly has been. It is the way you react to and deal with those challenges that defines you.”

On the day of the accident, Gibbons, who was 34 at the time, and his friends Damien Bergin, the 32-year-old pilot, and Mark Reilly, who was 49, were riding high, "fuelled by the belief that anything was possible". It was Reilly's birthday, and he was keen to get home to spend it with his three children.

The helicopter hit fog over Slieve Aughty, in east Co Galway. As the cloud became thicker it was as if time stood still, Gibbons says. They were travelling at 125km/h, not knowing which way was up or which direction they were flying in.

When Bergin took the decision to reduce speed and make a sharp right turn, the aircraft clipped a stand of trees, and its rotor broke. The helicopter smashed through the forest before hitting the ground with “an unmerciful thud” at 115km/h.

Despite his injuries, Bergins was determined to help his friends. He managed to call the emergency services and give an idea of their position. He credits his two friends for his survival that day: Reilly for telling him to sit in the front even though it was Reilly’s turn, and Bergin for the heroic efforts he made to get them rescued.

Reilly, who was seriously injured, did not respond to the efforts of the emergency services to revive him. Bergin died that night in hospital.

Fallen to pieces

Gibbons’s own injuries included fractures of the spine, forehead, elbow, toe, sternum and rib, as well as a collapsed lung and serious brain injury.

Other people might fallen to pieces after such a tragedy. Gibbons, displaying “survivor personality” that he believes he inherited from his mother, Carmel, was walking 10 days after the accident, against medical advice. His love for his mother, who split from his father when Gibbons was three months old, and raised Michael and his two sisters alone, shines from the book.

He says, “I don’t spend time wallowing in grief or mourning my dead friends. If I did it would be a complete insult to Mark and Damien. If one of them had survived instead of me I would have wanted him to live the fullest life he possibly could, to cram as much as humanly possible into that life. I now cherish every single day. I live it to the full.”

The book is the final entry on a bucket list that Gibbons compiled two days after the crash, when he was lying in intensive care. Other ambitions he put on the list were to make as complete a physical recovery as possible, move to New York and travel the world.

For four years he was embroiled in a legal battle with insurance companies for compensation. He secured a settlement of more than €1 million at the High Court in July 2009. He graduated with a master’s in organisational psychology from Columbia University, in New York, despite still struggling with memory and concentration problems resulting from his injury. (He also suffers pain and paralysis down his right side if he sits for too long; he finds relief in Bikram yoga.)

Gibbons, who lives between the US and Galway, travelled the world and continues to do so with his girlfriend, Natalie.

He has now moved into property development, buying the historic Fort Eyre in Shantalla, Galway, from liquidators and restoring it.

The proceeds from Gibbons's book are going towards medical expenses for his six-year-old niece Ciara Brown, who was born with no lower limbs. "Ciara is an amazing child. She has the family genes: immense willpower and a stubborn refusal to give up." Survivor is published by Londubh Books