A dramatic rescue was mounted to airlift a Skipton diver to hospital for emergency treatment after he suffered a serious illness while wreck diving off the Northumbrian coast.

Experienced diver Simon Moorhouse, 25, had surfaced after about 45 minutes underwater and suffered major head pains before becoming dizzy and losing consciousness.

Immediately, his team members at Keighley Diving Club and Skipton Buddies gave him oxygen and quickly alerted the coastguard.

Mr Moorhouse was airlifted by an RAF Sea King helicopter to Aberdeen hospital where he spent eight hours in a specialist decompression chamber for treatment.

He had suffered a lung barotrauma – a potentially fatal condition caused by air bubbles in the blood stream – which had led to an aneurysm.

Mr Moorhouse was yesterday recovering in Aberdeen following his ordeal at about 11am on Saturday.

Jonathan Taylor, a dive marshall at Skipton Buddies diving club, said: “It was very worrying. I have seen things like this happen before, but usually when people get the bends, they feel aches or pains. He was not showing any symptoms, but was just semi-conscious.”

Mr Taylor said it was lucky a team of experienced divers were on board the boat.

He said: “It could have been a lot worse because it took us at least 20 to 25 minutes to get back to the harbour. We had him on oxygen and the RNLI and RAF came to help us.”

An RNLI spokesman said it had scrambled the Seahouses lifeboat and that the RAF rescue helicopter had been sent from RAF Boulmer, near Alnwick, Northumberland, on the advice of a specialist diving doctor.

She said: “The ill diver, together with his dive buddy, were all then airlifted, and flown to the hyperbaric decompression chamber at Aberdeen for treatment. The diver had been diving to 21 metres, at a popular dive location.”

Neither Mr Moorhouse, who was recovering in a hotel in Aberdeen, nor his wife Naomi were available for comment yesterday.