On the 12th of August in 2024, a pilot fatally crashed a Robinson R44 into the top of a hotel building in Cairns, Australia.

The pilot held a commercial helicopter licence issued by the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority, including type ratings for the Robinson R44 helicopter. He had 157.8 hours flying experience, with 16.8 hours on Robinson R44 helicopters and ten hours night flying in Cabri G2 helicopters. His licence had a limitation for night flights to be conducted within 25 nautical miles of a lit aerodrome.

This is a standard restriction in New Zealand for pilots who have completed basic night training but haven’t yet accumulated enough night flying experience, ensuring that pilots new to night operations remain close to the visual reference of a lit aerodrome until they have gained more experience.

In February 2023, eighteen months before the accident, the pilot registered for an equivalent flight crew licence in Australia. The Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) granted the pilot a Civil Aviation Regulation Part 61 commercial pilot licence for single-engine helicopters. The pilot also held a CASA low-level rating but did not hold a rating for night flights.

The pilot’s logbook did not have any entries for helicopter flights in Australia.

In April 2024, four months before the accident, the pilot got a job working for Nautilus Aviation as a ground crew member at Cairns Airport. His role included general ground duties, including washing and refuelling helicopters, transporting passengers by car, and taking fuel from Cairns Airport to the helipad near the Cairns marina (by road). He was not authorised to fly any of the Nautilus Aviation helicopters.

The CEO of Nautilus Aviation described him after the crash as a model employee who had recently been named employee of the month. There was no evidence of personal or professional distress and no history of reckless behaviour.

He had just received a promotion, transitioning from general ground duties at Cairns to a specialised fuelling role at Horn Island, a small island in the Torres Strait in Queensland, about 800 kilometres north of Cairns. He was due to travel to Horn Island on Monday morning, the 12th of August.

On Sunday evening, the 11th, the pilot’s friends organised a farewell party, as he was moving bases to Horn Island. The pilot went out drinking with those friends and colleagues.  Later, Nautilus Aviation told the press that the other employees of the company went home at 20:30. “It wasn’t a booze up, it wasn’t a huge night.”

However, the pilot did not arrive home at his apartment until around 23:00. The next sighting is at 01:00, now the 12th of August, when local CCTV showed the pilot leaving his apartment and getting into his car. He drove to Cairns Airport.

As ground staff at the airport, the pilot had security codes for access and was able to walk straight to the hangar. The hangar held three helicopters. The two larger helicopters blocked the hangar door from closing, so the hangar was left open. The third helicopter was a Robinson R44 Raven helicopter, registered in Australia as VH-ERH.

The Robinson R44 was a sixteen-year-old single-engine light utility helicopter with a total of 4,142 flight hours. Nautilus Aviation had registered it ten years before. There was no cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder installed.

The helicopter keys were routinely left inside helicopters which were parked in hangars. In North Queensland, aircraft operators must secure unattended aircraft, either by storing the aircraft in locked/secured hangars or by removing the keys from the aircraft. In this case, the Robinson R44 was in a hangar, but the hangar had been left open to park the other two helicopters.

It was 01:30 when the pilot pulled the Robinson R44 out of the hangar using detachable ground wheels fitted to the helicopter’s skids. The weather was overcast, with drizzly rain and visibility decreasing.

There were Australian Federal Police officers and airport safety officers on duty, but they were not expecting any flights and did not have a view of the hangar. As the pilot had used authorised security codes, there was no security breach to attract their attention.

The pilot dragged the helicopter onto a helipad and removed the ground wheels, storing them safely before boarding the helicopter.

CCTV footage showed the cockpit lights turn on and then the strobe lights started to flash. At Nautilus, strobe lights were generally left on all the time and the helicopters were shut down with the strobe lights set to on.

This meant that as the pilot turned the battery switch on, the strobe lights automatically started flashing.

The footage showed the helicopter go dark as the strobe lights and the cockpit light were turned off again, again, likely the battery switch turned to off. Then, two minutes later, the cockpit light turned on again but this time without the strobes. The cockpit lights turned off and on again three times over the next few minutes. The strobes were never turned back on.

Once the strobe lights were off, there was nothing to direct the security officers’ attention to the helipad.

Cairns Airport has 24-hour air traffic control services based on the control tower. The controller on duty had dealt with a flight at half past midnight, the last flight of the night.

For the rest of the night, the controller was on sight and available for unscheduled flights if needed, for example, search and rescue operations or diverted flights. The next scheduled flight was at 05:00.

The controller stayed on the top floor of the control tower but as there were no scheduled flights, the controller was not expected to stay at his console. Air Traffic Control systems are not designed to protect against unauthorised departures. Instead, the controller worked on an internal training course and various clerical tasks. The speakers were on, which allowed the controller to maintain a listening watch for unscheduled flights.

The controller was taking a break, as standard during low-traffic overnight periods, sitting on a recliner chair with limited view of the airfield, when there was a click on the radio. It was 01:42. The controller stood and checked the console at 01:43 for any new flight plans. There were not.

The pilot started the Robinson R44, which appeared on the console about 90 seconds later. By now, the controller was back on the recliner chair with no idea that an unauthorised helicopter was preparing for departure.

The main rotor began to rotate. At 01:46, the helicopter lifted off of the helipad.

After climbing to about 500 feet, the helicopter turned left, heading south and following a highway directly towards Cairns city centre. The area was well lit up, with plenty of artificial lighting from the city buildings and street lighting.

The pilot then made a slight turn to fly directly towards the pilot’s apartment. He overflew the apartment and continued towards the coastline, where he orbited the Cairns wharf complex. Then the helicopter flew north around the Cairns Marian before following the coastline back.

Helicopters flying over populated areas are required to fly at least 1,000 feet above the highest feature or obstacle within a 300-metre radius. The Robinson R44’s altitude was 500 feet or below throughout the flight.

The GPS data ended there, 70 seconds before the collision. The ATSB noted that this was consistent with other units of the same model that they have recovered from accident sites.

The final moments of the flight were recorded on ground-based radar, which showed the Robinson R44 tacking back along the coast towards the airport. Had the pilot continued to the airport, he might have landed safely. Although he would have thrown away his career, he would have at least kept his life.

However, instead, he turned again, flying over his apartment for a second time before returning to the coast. He followed the coast towards the marina for about one kilometre.

At 01:51, security cameras briefly captured the helicopter abruptly pitching up before descending steeply.

Then the helicopter crashed into the top of the Cairns Doubletree hotel, instantly killing the pilot.

The main rotor struck the building first, with parts of the blades found in the top floor hotel rooms. The rest of the helicopter was on the roof, with the cockpit, systems and engine severely damaged in the impact. The fuel caught on fire.

Although it’s impossible to know for sure because of the damage, there’s no indication of any mechanical issues with the helicopter. There was no sign of an in-flight fire. The tail boom was intact, so the tail rotor did not fail.

There was no damage to the skids, which shows that the helicopter was not upright (for example trying to land on the roof).

Instead, it quickly became clear that the helicopter was almost upside down (inverted) and struck the hotel room window blades first.

An elderly couple were fast asleep in the room when the helicopter blades struck their window, with the main rotor blade tip breaking off into the room. They were thankfully not injured by the shattered piece of the rotor blade tip flying through the room, although they were later taken to hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation.

The rest of the rotor blade broke off in the room next door, taking out the window and leaving a clear witness mark on the wall. This damage showed that the main rotors were travelling at speed, consistent with the engine at a high-power setting.  I can only assume that this room was unoccupied as there were no reports of injuries despite the violence of the impact.

More pieces of the rotor blade were found in the parkland across the road, showing the strength with which they impacted the windows. The hotel quickly evacuated all guests and reported no further injuries.

Toxicology tests showed that the pilot had significant blood-alcohol content at the time of death and clearly still intoxicated during the flight and crash. The pilot’s decision making skills were clearly severely impaired. His level of inebriation would also have had a great effect on his coordination and reaction time.

This three-minute ATSB video recreates the route and the final moments of the flight:

The ATSB’s final conclusion is essentially a shrug of the shoulders.

For reasons unknown, pilot actions resulted in a collision with a building while conducting an unauthorised and unnecessary flight, while affected by alcohol, late at nights and at low heights over a built-up area, and without night flying endorsements.

There’s no way of knowing why the pilot decided that night that it was a good idea to steal the Robinson R44 and take it for a low-level flight over Cairns.

He had turned off the strobe lights to conceal his departure, showing that he knew there would be consequences if he got caught. He flew the helicopter for just five minutes, but those five minutes must have been heavily taxing. He was not rated for night flight in Australia and had never flown a Robinson R44 at night before.  Flying at low level would have required intense concentration, with constant control inputs.

And all this at 2am, after a night of heavy drinking.

There’s no evidence that he meant to crash the helicopter. Rather, he seemed to have been on a sightseeing tour, flying over his apartment and Cairns wharf, perhaps a goodbye flight before leaving for Horn Island. Tired and drunk, he must have been exhausted.

The sharp pitch-up moment captured on camera may have been the pilot seeing the building at the last minute, pitching up abruptly to try to increase clearance. As a result of the pitch up, the helicopter would have rapidly lost airspeed and lift.

It’s possible that the main rotor blade stalled. But more likely is that the pilot realised that he had pitched up too aggressively and over-corrected, shoving the cyclic forward for a fast nose-down input. This is a well-known phenomenon known as pilot-induced oscillation, where the pilot overcorrects in one direction and then overcorrects again in the opposite direction.

At some point, either to increase thrust while pitching up or to arrest the sudden descent, the pilot increased the engine power to full.

Either way, only a few hundred feet above the ground, the pilot had only milliseconds in which to react in a helicopter in which he had no recent experience and only 16.8 hours total flight time.

The truth is, the pilot showed surprising technical ability to manage the Robinson R44 for five minutes of low-level flight despite his fatigue and clear inebriation.

I guess in the end, it doesn’t really matter what precisely went wrong. When faced with a sudden problem requiring quick reactions, he simply did not have the mental faculties to deal with it. By the time the helicopter flew into the hotel, it was inverted, crashing into the building blades first. He lost control, losing his life and risking the lives of others, for an inexplicable unauthorised flight.