For the love of the job
“Every morning when I wake up I am so grateful I don’t have to rock up to some office in the city,” says Bury. “I started out as a solicitor, but switched to being an ROV pilot, flying ROVs off ships and oil rigs to fix and install essential equipment. You could say being an ROV operator is a bit like playing with big, million-pound toys – although of course they are not toys.
“ROVs – which can be as small as a handbag or as big as a transit van – enable companies to carry out essential work on everything from oil rigs to internet fibre optic cables on the seabed.”
Bury currently works as a chief instructor, training ROV pilots at The Underwater Centre in Fort William. “Every day can be different,” he says. “Sometimes I am in the classroom training students. Most of them are like I was, people who get to a certain stage in life and want to change career. They could be former air-force technicians, people who worked in the electronics industry or perhaps on the factory floor with machinery. You could say they are the sort of people who like to look under the bonnet of a car and figure out how it works.
“If I’m not in the classroom, then I am out on the pier in one of the two ROV shacks giving a practical. The pier is 800 metres long, and the water 50 metres deep, and it is as close as to simulating what it would be like flying a ROV off an oil rig as you can get from land.”
The Daily Telegraph, 7th May 2009, Natasha Mann