airdog07
January 25th, 2011, 09:41 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d8DAwqQ95g
Return to the Fatal Sky Broadcast: 18/08/2009
Reporter: Trevor Bormann
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200908/r417289_1979093.jpg (http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200908/r417289_1979096.jpg)To travel any distance in PNG, air travel is often the only viable option.
At Mount Hagen in the PNG Highlands a mother and father grieve the loss of bright and ambitious son who yearned to take the helm of an international airliner. Their commercial pilot son perished in a light-plane crash 2 years earlier and yet PNG’s aviation regulators had failed to examine why the crash had occurred. Glen and Veronica Kundin wanted answers and there were none.
“This is a life we are talking about! There must be an investigation. We must get to the bottom of it. Whether it is a technical fault, whether it is pilot error, these things have got to be known.” GLEN KUNDIN, FATHER OF PILOT PATRICK
Foreign Correspondent exposed a litany of failures and witnessed sloppy standards and seat-of-the-pants procedures. Some of the aviation outfits flying the PNG skies were plain dangerous others were largely unregulated and then there were questions about the requisite skills of pilots.
Perhaps most alarming of all was the inability or unwillingness of authorities to investigate what happened after things did go wrong. Insiders - frustrated and disheartened - spoke out.
“If we have a major prang here we can’t do a damned thing. Nobody can do anything. Now that is very serious.” SIDNEY O’TOOLE
SENIOR AIR CRASH INVESTIGATOR
Aviation insiders like Sidney O’Toole told us that over the past two decades airline safety standards had ‘fallen over the edge‘ and some were predicting disaster. That disaster has come to pass with the loss of 13 lives in the crash of a Twin Otter plane enroute to Kokoda.
Foreign Correspondent revisits some of the glaring problems exposed in our 2008 report and importantly speaks again with some of the key identities who participated. Others in our story continue to mourn – including an Australian family who lost a loved one and who await vainly for answers.
New accounts and perspectives about a deeply troubled and dangerous industry – this time against the heart-breaking backdrop of the Kokoda tragedy.
BORMANN: At a mountain top village along the Kokoda Track, a perilous approach to a cleared patch of hillside that passes for a runway. It’s the ultimate test of skills for the pilot and a nail biting ride for his passengers. With few roads, these flights are a lifeline to communities but the imposing Owen Stanley Range and its notorious weather, make this some of the most dangerous flying in the world. Pilots from around the world come here to earn their stripes and clock some hours – and many home-grown flyers too are making their mark.
GLEN KUNDIN: “He never failed me - from pre-school right up to high school and the flying school, he never failed me. I lost a son. A man with a brain, a man with a future, with a vision – I lost him.”
BORMANN: At 27 years old and with the prospect of flying internationally, Patrick Kundin’s life ended at the controls. He and his co-pilot died when their plane plunged into the jungle.
GLEN KUNDIN: “Airlink had a lot of crashes and he did mention that the aircraft were very old aircraft.”
VERONICA KUNDIN: “They rang around 6.30 in the evening and they said, “Did you know that the plane went down?” And I prayed…. screamed.” [crying]
BORMANN: The wreckage remained in the undergrowth and clues that might point to a cause eroded with time. There would be no air crash investigation for another two years, until Glen Kundin was to sue the PNG Government.
GLEN KUNDIN: [2008] “Even though I lost my son, I must go to court to prove wrong and right and also I’m doing it for the sake of the other public and the other pilots.”
VERONICA KUNDIN: “There’s not a moment in my life that I don’t think about him. I think that’s all I can say now.”
BORMANN: A Foreign Correspondent investigation last year exposed a scandalous failure of air safety standards in Papua New Guinea. At the time, 19 recent crashes were either only partially investigated, or not investigated at all.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “In recent years we’ve had two fatal accidents, we’ve never got on the ground to. Fatal. Now that would be unheard of anywhere in the world.”
BORMANN: Sidney O’Toole was blowing the whistle on the agency he heads. He’s Chief of PNG’s Air Safety Investigation Branch and the country’s only air crash investigator.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “For the last 4 years we haven’t had a phone. I don’t have a computer. I don’t have email and we don’t have a dedicated fax.”
BORMANN: His investigation branch was so chronically under-funded, he could barely operate, and what’s more, Sidney O’Toole’s unit had no legal standing.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “We can’t legally go to an accident site and we can’t interview people, we can’t recover items off an aircraft for further work.”
BORMANN: Fed up with his predicament, Sidney O’Toole decided to go public and speak to the ABC’s then PNG correspondent, Steve Marshall. His earnest plea for more funding was to unsettle many in the PNG bureaucracy.
STEVE MARSHALL: “In this industry that he loved and had spent so many years in, in Papua New Guinea, he could see it crumbling before his eyes and really him speaking out was borne out of frustration and it was him putting his life or his job on the line to get a better result in the industry.”
BORMANN: So frustrated was the family of pilot Patrick Kundin, they decided to investigate his crash themselves, taking photos and interviewing witnesses at the site. But one vital piece of evidence would disappear forever.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “Now those two crew knew they were in a lot of trouble and they would have been screaming ‘May Day, May Day’ you know and all this sort of thing. There’s absolutely unarguably no question about it.”
BORMANN: The final communication between pilot Patrick Kundin and his control tower would have been recorded at an aviation transmission centre, but within days of the crash, the tapes had been recycled.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “Can you imagine what the crew could have told us?”
BORMANN: This is Papua New Guinea’s second international airport. Mount Hagen is a busy nexus for air traffic – it handles jet aircraft that can seat up to one hundred passengers. When we visited, this was the airport’s emergency fire unit. An aging truck donated by Australia nine years ago. Its fire fighters were ever ready, but there were only four of them, plus a couple of trainees.
FIRE CHIEF: “Unfortunately we have only one fire tender and when this breaks down we have no emergency rescue at Airport Hagen. So the airline companies have to sacrifice their own… come with their own emergency plans.”
BORMANN: The chief was pleading for more staff, for a better emergency service and was under no illusions about his team’s ability to handle a crash at the airport.
FIRE CHIEF: “If I can rescue one man or two… and then we’ll have 70 or 80 passengers burned alive.”
BORMANN: Under-resourced and demoralised, the airport’s fire crew can only hope they’ll never be needed in a real emergency. [Yogyakarta, Indonesia 2007] It’s a shortcoming exposed in the 2007 Garuda crash in Indonesia when 21 people, including 5 Australians, died in a crash landing at Yogyakarta.
COLIN WEIR: “We’ve seen it in Indonesia with the Garuda accident and it’s a very, very serious issue. If they had a major accident with an F100 or a Dash 8 with fifty passengers on board, it would be you know catastrophic because you simply don’t have the manpower to deal with that accident as we saw in Yogyakarta.”
BORMANN: One year on and Melbourne based safety auditor Colin Weir says PNG has a long way to go.
COLIN WEIR: “The Australian Government needs to send over local expertise from Australia that works with them on a continuous basis – possibly for two or three years – to bring everything up to an acceptable level. There’s absolutely no other way of doing it. I think there’s a moral obligation on the authorities there and perhaps crossing over to the Australian authorities that every single one of those accidents is investigated as thoroughly as it can be, even if it goes back 19 years.”
LAURIE LESLIE: “I think he just liked the countryside, the people. He thought the weather up there was absolutely fantastic. He seemed to be recognised as though he was a Father Christmas for a lot of the kids in the villages.”
BORMANN: For 30 years Melbourne pilot Ian Leslie, pursued the perilous challenge of commercial flying in PNG. On New Years Eve 2004, his life ended when his Cessna ploughed into a hill near a bush runway. To this day his brother Laurie has many questions and few answers.
LAURIE LESLIE: “It’s just a complete waste, not only a waste of a life but it just affects so many other people around them.
There wasn’t very much left of the main fuselage of the aircraft. The wings were used in fences or rooves and I thought it was pretty disgusting that people that he’d gone up there to help, had basically pilfered the aircraft and any evidence of what led to his demise.”
BORMANN: There were the beginnings of an air crash inquiry but when investigator Sidney O’Toole arrived at the site, this is what confronted him, a group of villagers wanting money.
VILLAGE CHIEF: “We built a fence and left the plane wreckage inside it. And we waited for the Department of Civil Aviation to come along and say whether they wanted to take the parts. But they didn’t come. And it lay there in a public place and anybody could come in the night and steal the parts. And some are still lying there in the village.”
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “It’s happening on virtually every accident. When we’re trying to get the job done or we’re wrapping up with everything, I get surrounded by 15 or 20 people who are all armed, right, demanding very large amounts of cash out of me on the spot and it’s… yeah it’s pretty intimidating, yep.”
BORMANN: For the friends Ian Leslie left behind, there is much unfinished business in this village. Mathew Ipatu and his family looked up to the Australian pilot as a father figure.
MATHEW IPATU: “They forget Ian Leslie, and they’ve done nothing…. and they’ve never taken the wreckage out and they never completed his report.”
LAURIE LESLIE: [Showing photographs] “This is passing Ian’s ashes on to the pilot of a helicopter. Here’s the spreading of the ashes from the helicopter over the airfield.
I believe I’ve got closure on Ian’s passing but I would like to know what was the cause of the accident.”
BORMANN: Investigator Sidney O’Toole’s dogged criticism of the PNG Government finally jolted leaders here. Late last year came the announcement of a new body to look at air safety, supported by $800,000 from Australia.
STEVE MARSHALL: “Well the impact virtually backed the PNG Government into a corner where it had no option but to establish the Air Crash Commission that would then enable investigators to go out there and investigate these accidents that have been sitting idle for many, many years.”
BORMANN: “So this is a Commission of three people, that’s overseeing a branch of two investigators?”
COLIN WEIR: “That’s correct.”
BORMANN: “That’s somewhat farcical isn’t it?”
COLIN WEIR: “It just cannot function in that way, either practically or from a legal perspective.”
BORMANN: There could hardly have been a more shocking demonstration of just how treacherous flying can be here. Last week’s tragedy near Kokoda had all the elements that push the safety barrier – bad weather, constantly changing conditions and the challenge of landing on a small grass runway in the mountains. Nine of the passengers were Australians seeking adventure on the Kokoda Track. Along with the flight crew and two other passengers, their lives would end in thick jungle, several kilometres from the airstrip.
The jungle had claimed the wreckage and almost hidden it from view. Villagers cut their way to the crash scene and then smashed and sliced some more to make a clearing for Australian Blackhawk helicopters. Having already claimed thirteen lives, this environment was proving menacing for those who’d returned to retrieve the bodies.
WING COMMANDER DAVID HOWARD: “To get across to the crash site we try to get through an area called the Kokoda Gap. The problem then is the crash site is up at 5,200 feet so you need to be able to get back up to that height while remaining clear of cloud and during that activity, the Kokoda Gap may well close behind you and you wont be able to get back to Port Moresby.”
BORMANN: As bereaved family members of the crew gathered, there were questions over the experience of the pilot – 26 year old Jannie Moala. Even though she’d received her captain’s stripe only six months ago, she’d been flying Twin Otters for four years and had notched up two and a half thousand pilot hours.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “You never know what’s going to happen. You know you wake up in the morning, it’s a beautiful day and half an hour later, all hell could have broken loose with a very, very major accident.”
BORMANN: It should have been the most significant crash investigation of his time in Papua New Guinea, but as his Government grappled with the enormity of the crash, we found PNG’s entire Air Investigation team – Sidney O’Toole that is – in transit in Los Angeles.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “You know, I can’t be in two places at the same time. I’m on my Pat Malone to coin a phrase and there’s no backup. Our situation is… staffing situation is beyond critical. You know when I use the word desperate, I mean how desperate is desperate? You know it’s just ludicrous having one man.”
BORMANN: Sidney O’Toole was returning from Canada. He’d been there to oversee the examination of engines from the wreck of the crash that killed Patrick Kundin. With the Kundin family suing the Government, at last PNG authorities were taking the case seriously. News of last week’s crash came not from his bosses in PNG but from an Australian aviation official.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “I got a phone call from the ATSB in Canberra advising me of the accident. That’s the only information I’ve received from anybody. It’s the one and only phone call.”
BORMANN: With still a week of travelling before he has any chance to reach the crash site, Sidney O’Toole can only watch in frustration from afar.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “Absolute tragedy. In this particular type of operation it requires very heavy approach or requires a lot of manpower and resources to be able to achieve what you’re trying to achieve. When I look at the resources and everything that have been provided by the Australian Government, there was absolutely positively no way that our Commission or the Government of Papua New Guinea could respond in that manner. That the Australian is sending a very strong message to the Papua New Guinean Government that hey, this is the way you do this particular function.”
COLIN WEIR: “The critical issue is to get in there as soon as possible, to look at the accident profile and to work out what actually happened.”
BORMANN: Air crash investigators aren’t prone to hasty conclusions. But over the years too many pilots in Papua New Guinea have succumbed to a familiar but perilous trap in these mountains.
COLIN WEIR: “You reach a point where you have to make a decision whether to continue with the approach or to abort. With the cloud cover around there, the problem is that if you continue the approach and you have to overshoot, you’ve now got a situation where you can’t turn in the valley and you can’t outclimb the surrounding hilltops.”
BORMANN: Exactly what happened on that day will now be something that Australian crash investigators will hopefully discover. It was a tragedy Sidney O’Toole had predicted would happen. In the year since PNG’s Accident Investigation Commission was announced, it’s still not operating and there have been many more crashes.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “We had a total of twelve. I’d have to go through the records but there were a reasonable number that we never attended.”
BORMANN: Sidney O’Toole says he’s encouraged by the new Commission and money is beginning to flow but he’s puzzled by that $800,000 contribution from Australia.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “The AusAid money, I haven’t enquired about that. No one seems to know anything about it. The government appropriation of 4.6, yes we do have that. As for the AusAid money, haven’t got a clue.”
BORMANN: These mountains have claimed so many and in the coming weeks there’ll be more funerals for those lost in Papua New Guinea’s latest air tragedy. In so many previous accidents here, there can be no closure, but Glen and Veronica Kundin have not given up. They want to prove their son Patrick isn’t to blame for the crash that killed him and his co- pilot.
GLEN KUNDIN: “What I’m saying is, do I have a good government in this country, or not? That’s the question. In aviation industry there must be some law to protect the public.”
BORMANN: Their lawsuit has pressured the PNG Government to allow investigator Sidney O’Toole to at last get serious about an inquiry into their son’s accident.
GLEN KUNDIN: “I’m talking from my heart… I’m suffering, and I don’t want their families to suffer.”
BORMANN: A country so dependent on flying has a government that’s neglected air safety for too long. Despite fresh funding from Australia, that money is not being spent in the field to investigate accidents. But the one-man band that is its crash investigation unit, will plough on undaunted by everyone and everything that works against him.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “Okay if they sack me they sack me. If you get the sack for telling the truth, well why be here?”
Return to the Fatal Sky Broadcast: 18/08/2009
Reporter: Trevor Bormann
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200908/r417289_1979093.jpg (http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200908/r417289_1979096.jpg)To travel any distance in PNG, air travel is often the only viable option.
At Mount Hagen in the PNG Highlands a mother and father grieve the loss of bright and ambitious son who yearned to take the helm of an international airliner. Their commercial pilot son perished in a light-plane crash 2 years earlier and yet PNG’s aviation regulators had failed to examine why the crash had occurred. Glen and Veronica Kundin wanted answers and there were none.
“This is a life we are talking about! There must be an investigation. We must get to the bottom of it. Whether it is a technical fault, whether it is pilot error, these things have got to be known.” GLEN KUNDIN, FATHER OF PILOT PATRICK
Foreign Correspondent exposed a litany of failures and witnessed sloppy standards and seat-of-the-pants procedures. Some of the aviation outfits flying the PNG skies were plain dangerous others were largely unregulated and then there were questions about the requisite skills of pilots.
Perhaps most alarming of all was the inability or unwillingness of authorities to investigate what happened after things did go wrong. Insiders - frustrated and disheartened - spoke out.
“If we have a major prang here we can’t do a damned thing. Nobody can do anything. Now that is very serious.” SIDNEY O’TOOLE
SENIOR AIR CRASH INVESTIGATOR
Aviation insiders like Sidney O’Toole told us that over the past two decades airline safety standards had ‘fallen over the edge‘ and some were predicting disaster. That disaster has come to pass with the loss of 13 lives in the crash of a Twin Otter plane enroute to Kokoda.
Foreign Correspondent revisits some of the glaring problems exposed in our 2008 report and importantly speaks again with some of the key identities who participated. Others in our story continue to mourn – including an Australian family who lost a loved one and who await vainly for answers.
New accounts and perspectives about a deeply troubled and dangerous industry – this time against the heart-breaking backdrop of the Kokoda tragedy.
BORMANN: At a mountain top village along the Kokoda Track, a perilous approach to a cleared patch of hillside that passes for a runway. It’s the ultimate test of skills for the pilot and a nail biting ride for his passengers. With few roads, these flights are a lifeline to communities but the imposing Owen Stanley Range and its notorious weather, make this some of the most dangerous flying in the world. Pilots from around the world come here to earn their stripes and clock some hours – and many home-grown flyers too are making their mark.
GLEN KUNDIN: “He never failed me - from pre-school right up to high school and the flying school, he never failed me. I lost a son. A man with a brain, a man with a future, with a vision – I lost him.”
BORMANN: At 27 years old and with the prospect of flying internationally, Patrick Kundin’s life ended at the controls. He and his co-pilot died when their plane plunged into the jungle.
GLEN KUNDIN: “Airlink had a lot of crashes and he did mention that the aircraft were very old aircraft.”
VERONICA KUNDIN: “They rang around 6.30 in the evening and they said, “Did you know that the plane went down?” And I prayed…. screamed.” [crying]
BORMANN: The wreckage remained in the undergrowth and clues that might point to a cause eroded with time. There would be no air crash investigation for another two years, until Glen Kundin was to sue the PNG Government.
GLEN KUNDIN: [2008] “Even though I lost my son, I must go to court to prove wrong and right and also I’m doing it for the sake of the other public and the other pilots.”
VERONICA KUNDIN: “There’s not a moment in my life that I don’t think about him. I think that’s all I can say now.”
BORMANN: A Foreign Correspondent investigation last year exposed a scandalous failure of air safety standards in Papua New Guinea. At the time, 19 recent crashes were either only partially investigated, or not investigated at all.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “In recent years we’ve had two fatal accidents, we’ve never got on the ground to. Fatal. Now that would be unheard of anywhere in the world.”
BORMANN: Sidney O’Toole was blowing the whistle on the agency he heads. He’s Chief of PNG’s Air Safety Investigation Branch and the country’s only air crash investigator.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “For the last 4 years we haven’t had a phone. I don’t have a computer. I don’t have email and we don’t have a dedicated fax.”
BORMANN: His investigation branch was so chronically under-funded, he could barely operate, and what’s more, Sidney O’Toole’s unit had no legal standing.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “We can’t legally go to an accident site and we can’t interview people, we can’t recover items off an aircraft for further work.”
BORMANN: Fed up with his predicament, Sidney O’Toole decided to go public and speak to the ABC’s then PNG correspondent, Steve Marshall. His earnest plea for more funding was to unsettle many in the PNG bureaucracy.
STEVE MARSHALL: “In this industry that he loved and had spent so many years in, in Papua New Guinea, he could see it crumbling before his eyes and really him speaking out was borne out of frustration and it was him putting his life or his job on the line to get a better result in the industry.”
BORMANN: So frustrated was the family of pilot Patrick Kundin, they decided to investigate his crash themselves, taking photos and interviewing witnesses at the site. But one vital piece of evidence would disappear forever.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “Now those two crew knew they were in a lot of trouble and they would have been screaming ‘May Day, May Day’ you know and all this sort of thing. There’s absolutely unarguably no question about it.”
BORMANN: The final communication between pilot Patrick Kundin and his control tower would have been recorded at an aviation transmission centre, but within days of the crash, the tapes had been recycled.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “Can you imagine what the crew could have told us?”
BORMANN: This is Papua New Guinea’s second international airport. Mount Hagen is a busy nexus for air traffic – it handles jet aircraft that can seat up to one hundred passengers. When we visited, this was the airport’s emergency fire unit. An aging truck donated by Australia nine years ago. Its fire fighters were ever ready, but there were only four of them, plus a couple of trainees.
FIRE CHIEF: “Unfortunately we have only one fire tender and when this breaks down we have no emergency rescue at Airport Hagen. So the airline companies have to sacrifice their own… come with their own emergency plans.”
BORMANN: The chief was pleading for more staff, for a better emergency service and was under no illusions about his team’s ability to handle a crash at the airport.
FIRE CHIEF: “If I can rescue one man or two… and then we’ll have 70 or 80 passengers burned alive.”
BORMANN: Under-resourced and demoralised, the airport’s fire crew can only hope they’ll never be needed in a real emergency. [Yogyakarta, Indonesia 2007] It’s a shortcoming exposed in the 2007 Garuda crash in Indonesia when 21 people, including 5 Australians, died in a crash landing at Yogyakarta.
COLIN WEIR: “We’ve seen it in Indonesia with the Garuda accident and it’s a very, very serious issue. If they had a major accident with an F100 or a Dash 8 with fifty passengers on board, it would be you know catastrophic because you simply don’t have the manpower to deal with that accident as we saw in Yogyakarta.”
BORMANN: One year on and Melbourne based safety auditor Colin Weir says PNG has a long way to go.
COLIN WEIR: “The Australian Government needs to send over local expertise from Australia that works with them on a continuous basis – possibly for two or three years – to bring everything up to an acceptable level. There’s absolutely no other way of doing it. I think there’s a moral obligation on the authorities there and perhaps crossing over to the Australian authorities that every single one of those accidents is investigated as thoroughly as it can be, even if it goes back 19 years.”
LAURIE LESLIE: “I think he just liked the countryside, the people. He thought the weather up there was absolutely fantastic. He seemed to be recognised as though he was a Father Christmas for a lot of the kids in the villages.”
BORMANN: For 30 years Melbourne pilot Ian Leslie, pursued the perilous challenge of commercial flying in PNG. On New Years Eve 2004, his life ended when his Cessna ploughed into a hill near a bush runway. To this day his brother Laurie has many questions and few answers.
LAURIE LESLIE: “It’s just a complete waste, not only a waste of a life but it just affects so many other people around them.
There wasn’t very much left of the main fuselage of the aircraft. The wings were used in fences or rooves and I thought it was pretty disgusting that people that he’d gone up there to help, had basically pilfered the aircraft and any evidence of what led to his demise.”
BORMANN: There were the beginnings of an air crash inquiry but when investigator Sidney O’Toole arrived at the site, this is what confronted him, a group of villagers wanting money.
VILLAGE CHIEF: “We built a fence and left the plane wreckage inside it. And we waited for the Department of Civil Aviation to come along and say whether they wanted to take the parts. But they didn’t come. And it lay there in a public place and anybody could come in the night and steal the parts. And some are still lying there in the village.”
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “It’s happening on virtually every accident. When we’re trying to get the job done or we’re wrapping up with everything, I get surrounded by 15 or 20 people who are all armed, right, demanding very large amounts of cash out of me on the spot and it’s… yeah it’s pretty intimidating, yep.”
BORMANN: For the friends Ian Leslie left behind, there is much unfinished business in this village. Mathew Ipatu and his family looked up to the Australian pilot as a father figure.
MATHEW IPATU: “They forget Ian Leslie, and they’ve done nothing…. and they’ve never taken the wreckage out and they never completed his report.”
LAURIE LESLIE: [Showing photographs] “This is passing Ian’s ashes on to the pilot of a helicopter. Here’s the spreading of the ashes from the helicopter over the airfield.
I believe I’ve got closure on Ian’s passing but I would like to know what was the cause of the accident.”
BORMANN: Investigator Sidney O’Toole’s dogged criticism of the PNG Government finally jolted leaders here. Late last year came the announcement of a new body to look at air safety, supported by $800,000 from Australia.
STEVE MARSHALL: “Well the impact virtually backed the PNG Government into a corner where it had no option but to establish the Air Crash Commission that would then enable investigators to go out there and investigate these accidents that have been sitting idle for many, many years.”
BORMANN: “So this is a Commission of three people, that’s overseeing a branch of two investigators?”
COLIN WEIR: “That’s correct.”
BORMANN: “That’s somewhat farcical isn’t it?”
COLIN WEIR: “It just cannot function in that way, either practically or from a legal perspective.”
BORMANN: There could hardly have been a more shocking demonstration of just how treacherous flying can be here. Last week’s tragedy near Kokoda had all the elements that push the safety barrier – bad weather, constantly changing conditions and the challenge of landing on a small grass runway in the mountains. Nine of the passengers were Australians seeking adventure on the Kokoda Track. Along with the flight crew and two other passengers, their lives would end in thick jungle, several kilometres from the airstrip.
The jungle had claimed the wreckage and almost hidden it from view. Villagers cut their way to the crash scene and then smashed and sliced some more to make a clearing for Australian Blackhawk helicopters. Having already claimed thirteen lives, this environment was proving menacing for those who’d returned to retrieve the bodies.
WING COMMANDER DAVID HOWARD: “To get across to the crash site we try to get through an area called the Kokoda Gap. The problem then is the crash site is up at 5,200 feet so you need to be able to get back up to that height while remaining clear of cloud and during that activity, the Kokoda Gap may well close behind you and you wont be able to get back to Port Moresby.”
BORMANN: As bereaved family members of the crew gathered, there were questions over the experience of the pilot – 26 year old Jannie Moala. Even though she’d received her captain’s stripe only six months ago, she’d been flying Twin Otters for four years and had notched up two and a half thousand pilot hours.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “You never know what’s going to happen. You know you wake up in the morning, it’s a beautiful day and half an hour later, all hell could have broken loose with a very, very major accident.”
BORMANN: It should have been the most significant crash investigation of his time in Papua New Guinea, but as his Government grappled with the enormity of the crash, we found PNG’s entire Air Investigation team – Sidney O’Toole that is – in transit in Los Angeles.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “You know, I can’t be in two places at the same time. I’m on my Pat Malone to coin a phrase and there’s no backup. Our situation is… staffing situation is beyond critical. You know when I use the word desperate, I mean how desperate is desperate? You know it’s just ludicrous having one man.”
BORMANN: Sidney O’Toole was returning from Canada. He’d been there to oversee the examination of engines from the wreck of the crash that killed Patrick Kundin. With the Kundin family suing the Government, at last PNG authorities were taking the case seriously. News of last week’s crash came not from his bosses in PNG but from an Australian aviation official.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “I got a phone call from the ATSB in Canberra advising me of the accident. That’s the only information I’ve received from anybody. It’s the one and only phone call.”
BORMANN: With still a week of travelling before he has any chance to reach the crash site, Sidney O’Toole can only watch in frustration from afar.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “Absolute tragedy. In this particular type of operation it requires very heavy approach or requires a lot of manpower and resources to be able to achieve what you’re trying to achieve. When I look at the resources and everything that have been provided by the Australian Government, there was absolutely positively no way that our Commission or the Government of Papua New Guinea could respond in that manner. That the Australian is sending a very strong message to the Papua New Guinean Government that hey, this is the way you do this particular function.”
COLIN WEIR: “The critical issue is to get in there as soon as possible, to look at the accident profile and to work out what actually happened.”
BORMANN: Air crash investigators aren’t prone to hasty conclusions. But over the years too many pilots in Papua New Guinea have succumbed to a familiar but perilous trap in these mountains.
COLIN WEIR: “You reach a point where you have to make a decision whether to continue with the approach or to abort. With the cloud cover around there, the problem is that if you continue the approach and you have to overshoot, you’ve now got a situation where you can’t turn in the valley and you can’t outclimb the surrounding hilltops.”
BORMANN: Exactly what happened on that day will now be something that Australian crash investigators will hopefully discover. It was a tragedy Sidney O’Toole had predicted would happen. In the year since PNG’s Accident Investigation Commission was announced, it’s still not operating and there have been many more crashes.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “We had a total of twelve. I’d have to go through the records but there were a reasonable number that we never attended.”
BORMANN: Sidney O’Toole says he’s encouraged by the new Commission and money is beginning to flow but he’s puzzled by that $800,000 contribution from Australia.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “The AusAid money, I haven’t enquired about that. No one seems to know anything about it. The government appropriation of 4.6, yes we do have that. As for the AusAid money, haven’t got a clue.”
BORMANN: These mountains have claimed so many and in the coming weeks there’ll be more funerals for those lost in Papua New Guinea’s latest air tragedy. In so many previous accidents here, there can be no closure, but Glen and Veronica Kundin have not given up. They want to prove their son Patrick isn’t to blame for the crash that killed him and his co- pilot.
GLEN KUNDIN: “What I’m saying is, do I have a good government in this country, or not? That’s the question. In aviation industry there must be some law to protect the public.”
BORMANN: Their lawsuit has pressured the PNG Government to allow investigator Sidney O’Toole to at last get serious about an inquiry into their son’s accident.
GLEN KUNDIN: “I’m talking from my heart… I’m suffering, and I don’t want their families to suffer.”
BORMANN: A country so dependent on flying has a government that’s neglected air safety for too long. Despite fresh funding from Australia, that money is not being spent in the field to investigate accidents. But the one-man band that is its crash investigation unit, will plough on undaunted by everyone and everything that works against him.
SIDNEY O’TOOLE: “Okay if they sack me they sack me. If you get the sack for telling the truth, well why be here?”