3 months ago
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Harrowing footage of the moment two Sea World helicopters crashed on the Gold Coast in 2023 has been shown to a court, as an inquest was opened into the incident.
Sea World Helicopter pilot Ash Jenkinson died along with British couple Ron and Diane Hughes and Sydney mother Vanessa Tadros. Tadros’ 10-year-old son Nicholas survived after weeks in intensive care.
Several other people were injured, including Winnie de Silva and her son Leon, 9, from Victoria. De Silva was expected to give evidence on Monday afternoon.
The inquest, before Coroner Carol Lee, is set to consider how the midair crash happened, whether safety management systems affected the conduct of the air operations, and the adequacy of training undertaken by the pilots.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau found earlier this year the crash could have been prevented if a litany of technical and safety issues had been rectified.
The bureau’s final report found an inbound taxiing call from one of the helicopters failed to register to the second helicopter boarding people on the helipad.
Footage of the final seconds before the two helicopters crashed emerged in the days after the incident, showing one helicopter taking off and heading towards the other.
The Sea World helicopters after one crashed to the ground and the other landed.Credit: AAP
Several family members in the Coroners Court in Brisbane watched the footage on Monday morning, which showed a passenger in the back seat of one of the helicopters, flown by Sea World Helicopters pilot Michael James, tapping James on the shoulder several times to alert him to the nearby helicopter.
The videos then showed to the court depicted the helicopters colliding, before James was able to gain control of his helicopter, and landing on a sandbar.
James died last year from cancer.
An excerpt of video from one of the helicopters shows the other helicopter above the helipad 10 seconds before passengers braced for impact.
The ATSB said a number of passengers were ejected from their seatbelts during the crash and if the seatbelts had been properly fitted, it might have led to more survivability.
In opening the inquest, counsel assisting Ian Harvey told the court both pilots did not see each other before the crash.
Ash Jenkinson with his fiancee Kosha.
He said the fundamental question was how that situation could unfold with two highly experienced pilots.
In the days before Christmas, Jenkinson had flown into a controlled airspace, and he was warned that the helicopter did not have a functioning transponder. The transponder was necessary for air operations to identify the aircraft in the area.
Jenkinson had not known about the non-functioning transponder until he received a warning in the weeks before the new year to have it fixed.
Harvey said the helipads were used by Sea World Helicopters in one of the busiest air corridors in the country.
Harvey questioned whether the commercial imperative to have new helicopters added to the Sea World fleet before Christmas 2022 overrode full consideration of safety factors, and whether this had brought untoward pressure on Jenkinson, who was the chief pilot.
The ATSB found Jenkinson had low levels of cocaine in his system, but the bureau said the drugs were unlikely to have affected his flying skills.
“Even if it must be concluded, as the ATSB has opined, the pilot was ‘unlikely to have been affected by the drug at the time of the accident’, was his resulted activity a way of trying to deal with the workload, stress and pressures occasioned by all of the issues he was trying to work his way through in December 2022 in relation to the onboarding of the two new aircraft?” Harvey said.
At the end of his opening address, Harvey, who described the accident as a terrible day of shock and grief, became emotional when speaking of how the families had been impacted.
The inquest is scheduled to run for two weeks, and will hear from 30 witnesses, including surviving passengers, police and Sea World employees.
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