AN INVESTIGATION is under way by the air accident investigation unit of the Department of Transport after a helicopter crashed and burst into flames in the car park of a secondary school in Bettystown, Co Meath.
The school is in part of the former Neptune Hotel, adjacent to the beach. Fortunately, none of the 80 first-year students were in the car park.
It is understood the only people in the hotel building were a man who had just begun a meeting with two passengers that the American registered S76 helicopter had dropped off on the beach a few minutes earlier. They were uninjured.
Four people including the pilot were taken to the Lourdes hospital in Drogheda with minor injuries.
Part of the ground floor of the hotel is used by Coláiste na hInse secondary school. It is the first secondary school in east Meath and was using the hotel as temporary accommodation for first-year students.
The school broke up for the day at 3.25pm, about an hour before the crash. Principal Anne Marie McCarrick said the school caretaker Brian Emmet "was heroic".
She said he helped to pull the pilot out and then went to a woman who was in a car in the car park.
"She didn't want to leave and he told her to go, that it was going to blow. He was the hero," she said.
Local resident John Shepard had walked to the shop with his two children when he saw the helicopter.
"He was trying to land but kept hitting the lamp posts in the car park. He clipped one of them and broke a propeller and that was that. It tipped on to the ground on its side," he said.
The fire is believed to have been started when an oxygen tank on board exploded. The force of the blast blew out a glass wall of the hotel.