Aviation body to face criminal investigation following fatal crash

Neither Farrell nor his light sports aircraft, a Jabiru J230-C (similar aircraft pictured), were equipped to fly into cloud, but he made the decision to venture into poor weather conditions to visit his fiancee’s father on 18 September 2022.

Farrell was airborne for 40 minutes before the aircraft crashed into remote and mountainous terrain in Victoria’s north-east.

By the time of the fatal crash, Farrell had 14.7 hours of flight training, but just 3.6 hours was solo. Of that training, 3.3 hours was completed on a single day and he was tested on 22 landings.

Among his many concerns, Coroner Paul Lawrie said it “beggars belief” Farrell – as a student pilot – could be “trained effectively to certificate standard in all the above aspects of flying in one day”.

Over one-and-a-half days, RAAus’ head of flight operations, Jillian Bailey, gave often “combative” evidence about the validity of Farrell’s recreational pilot’s license and cross-country endorsements.

Bailey claimed she had no concerns regarding the extent of training or experience underlying Farrell’s cross-country endorsement and did not consider auditing his trainer as a consequence of the crash.

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The court also heard that RAAus considered Farrell’s previous paragliding experience could be constituted as recognised flying time.

However, reference to her “own calculations” and a “summary document” led to Bailey showing the court a typed record with an email she received. It was not already part of the coronial brief.

This email, sent from Sports Aviation Federation of Australia’s safety manager, Ian Clarke, disclosed communications that were “wholly at odds with the picture of Farrell that had been presented to the court”.

Clarke wrote of concerns he had with Farrell’s “appetite for risk” and his “decision-making processes”, specifically, he “appeared to only think one step ahead and not look further to possible consequences”.

“Mat was particularly arrogant when it came to being honest about his decisions, denying there was a problem and refusing to recognise that he had made errors in judgment. His belief in his invincibility was a great worry,” Clarke added at the end of his email.

The email also revealed Farrell had approached a local flight instructor to receive a PG5 pilot certificate but was refused because his attitude “was not consistent with that of a PG5 pilot”. An accident investigator also disclosed Farrell was a “disaster waiting to happen”.

Upon learning of this email’s existence, the Coroner’s Court issued a notice to RAAus to produce further documents, which “clearly revealed that key aspects of Bailey’s evidence were false”.

This included a Teams message sent from Bailey to Matt Bouttell, chief executive of RAAus, disclosing she was concerned she “may have inadvertently” issued the certificate in contravention with the operations manual and hadn’t slept much as a result.

Bailey was then placed on a period of special leave.

Lawrie concluded RAAus “engaged in a deliberate strategy to hide these key issues from the court”.

“Bailey gave evidence which was false in material respects, which also served to hide these key issues,” the coroner added.

“The conduct of RAAus is wholly at odds with an organisation that has traditionally been actively involved in investigations of this type, assisting the court and Victoria Police.”

In a further comment in his report, Lawrie said Farrell’s trainer should have recognised Farrell was “over-confident” and “sought to imbue in his student a healthy degree of humility”.

Instead, Lawrie said the trainer offered “hubris” by claiming he had total confidence in Farrell’s ability “to do faultless navs anywhere”.

“How could this be said of anyone, no matter how gifted, when they had less than 15 hours total time in a powered aircraft? If this was indicative of [the trainer’s] signals to Farrell, as I expect it was, it can only have added to Farrell’s over-confidence,” Lawrie said.