On Monday 27th July, the Coastguards at Dover requested a helicopter to assist in a rescue effort to pluck six young people from a ledge on cliffs in Langdon Bay near Dover. The nearest available helicopter was a Belgian Air Force Sea King from Koksijde. Whilst waiting for it to arrive, a Coastguard cliff man was lowered to the casualties and helmets were delivered by rope to protect them from any falling chalk blown loose by the helicopter’s strong downdraught.
Within 30 minutes the Belgian Search and Rescue helicopter arrived. Its crew winched all the casualties to the helicopter, in two batches, and dropped them off at the Coastguard Station’s helipad. Fortunately none of the casualties required medical treatment.
Tony Hawkins from the Dover Coastguards said: “This would have been much more serious if there had been no helicopter available because manoeuvring a rescue boat in amongst the rocks to get to the base of the cliff once is dangerous and to have to do it safely six times would have been very difficult.”
Since it was set up in 1961, there have been as many as 2,500 Belgian Sea King Rescue missions (of which 80 percent at sea) during which some 1,500 lives have been saved. | 
