By Tricia Mifsud
A helicopter crash at Mt Disappointment on Thursday, which killed all five people on board, was one of the worst aviation crashes in Victoria’s history.
Four men and a woman including 32-year-old pilot Dean Neal, AXIchain finance consultant Ian Perry and AXIchain chief executive and founder Linda Woodford, 50, First AG Capital co-founder and managing director Nicholas Vasudeva, 53, and meat industry leader Paul Troja, 73, were travelling on a business trip to Ulupna in northern Victoria when the helicopter crashed on Thursday morning.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau, ATSB, chief commissioner Angus Mitchell spoke to the media at Mt Disappointment, near Wandong, on Friday before his team of investigators took over the scene to begin investigating the cause of the crash.
Mr Mitchell said the crash was one of several aviation accidents the ATSB was investigating.
“Over the last three months alone, we’ve had nine aircraft fatalities across five separate states and yesterday’s represents one of the worst in Victoria’s history, certainly since the 2017 accident at Essendon airport,” Mr Mitchell said.
Mr Mitchell said it was a ‘complex operation’ for police and State Emergency Services, SES, volunteers to access the site due to the dense vegetation and steep terrain.
Emergency services, with the assistance of the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, DEWLP, used two bulldozers and an excavator on Thursday night to pave a way to the site.
“Our investigation is very complex. We will look at what we can gather from the site, and as you can imagine that is quite challenging in a situation like this where its had a collision with terrain and potentially a fire,” he said.
“We will gather anything we can – whether it be recorders, whether it be anything that passengers may have had on them at the time.
“We’ll certainly look at trying reconstruct the site at a 3D [three dimensional] angle and we’ll quite often use drones and a series of softwares to do that.
“But equally, our investigators have already started that process of building together a picture and we did that within minutes of understanding that the aircraft had gone missing.
“That’s to go through maintenance records, go through qualifications, to look at things like the weather that was forecast for yesterday, plus what the weather that was experienced on the day.”
On the day of the crash, about 60 people from Victoria Police, Fire Rescue Victoria, Country Fire Authority, DELWP, SES and Ambulance Victoria assisted at the site.
SES volunteers from Whittlesea, Kilmore, Seymour, Nillumbik and Craigieburn assisted the recovery, with Whittlesea police initially managing the investigation.
The chartered helicopter was one of two that had taken off from Moorabbin Airport before picking up passengers in Batman Park, Melbourne, at about 7am.
Acting Inspector Josh Langelaan said police were notified at about 10.20am of the missing helicopter.
“[We were told] there was a missing helicopter, they were both flying through this morning, there was low cloud this morning. One helicopter came through the cloud, found that the other helicopter was missing and police were notified,” he said.
The Victoria Police air wing located the aircraft wreckage eight kilometres from Blair’s Hut in the Mt Disappointment State Forest, north of Whittlesea, at 11.45am.
Specialist search and rescue police officers accessed the site via a police helicopter at about 3pm in an attempt to search for survivors.
The ATSB deployed a team of transport safety investigators from its Canberra and Melbourne offices with expertise in helicopter operations and maintenance, and aerospace engineering, to the crash site, and as of yesterday, still remained at the site.
The ATSB will remove from the wreckage what is necessary to conduct the investigation before the site is handed over to insurers or the owner to decide what to do about the removal of the aircraft.
The investigation is expected to take six to eight weeks before an initial report is released, with a final report to be handed down at the conclusion of the investigation.
