PILOT’S BODY RECOVERED

Airline mourns as pilot’s body brought back

THE body of an Airlines of Tasmania pilot has been retrieved from wreckage in rugged terrain in Tasmania’s South-West. The body was recovered from the Par Avion plane which crashed on Saturday in bad weather.

AIRLINES of Tasmania suspended all flights yesterday as a specialist team prepared to investigate the site of Saturday’s fatal plane crash in the state’s South West.

The body of the pilot of the twin-engine Par Avion aircraft, which crashed in bad weather about 100 metres below the summit of West Portal in the Western Arthurs range, was retrieved late yesterday.

The 10-seater Britten-Norman Islander aircraft was en route to Melaleuca in Bathurst Harbour to pick up five tourists from the renowned Denny King settlement in the Southwest National Park.

Investigators believe the pilot, the plane’s only occupant, was trying to turn back when the crash occurred in low level cloud about 9am on Saturday.

“This is a tragedy for us,” Airlines of Tasmania managing director Shannon Wells said yesterday.

“We will be employing counsellors and psychologists and just making sure our team is OK to fly. A big part of aviation is mental health.

“We have lost one of our own and I want to make sure our pilots … are fit and fully capable of flying when they get behind the wheels of thehe planes.”

He said the pilot, whose identity has not yet been dis-disclosed, was experienced, had flown between Hobart and Melaleuca many timesmes — usually a 50-minute flight — and had been een flying with the commpany for three years.

The pilot moved to Tasmania to become a pilot, had trained here and was well versed in Tasmanian flying conditions, Mr Wells said.

“There’s been a lot of tears shed by myself and most of my colleagues.

“We are a small family business. We trainin up a lot of our people here and see the same people every day. We know everyone by name and when one of us doesn’t come home it really hits hard.”

The plane’s satellite tracker showed it — “for reasons we don’t know at this stage” — had turned back to Hobart before it crashed, Mr Wells said.

“The weather was overcast. There were passing showers in the area andd judging byb theth fact the police couldn’t access the site until late in the evening [on Saturday] it was obviously a sign that the cloud was quite low around the mountain area,” he said. “We have got no reason to believe there was a mechanical issue at this stage.” t ” The company said this had been the first time one of their planes had crashed between Hobart and Melaleuca since it first began flying there more than 20 years ago.

Two people died when an Airlines of Tasmania plane crashed off the East Coast during the 2014 Sydney to Hobart yacht race.

Tasmania Police said the pilot’s body had been recovered from wreckage on the West Portal mountainside.

“We had two objectives, to safely retrieve the pilot’s body and to forensically examine the scene,” Inspector Dave Wiss, of the Kingston police division, said.

“It was important to achieve both objectives for the sake of the family and to ensure a greater understanding of the events that contributed to this tragic event. Thankfully, both have been successfully achieved,” he said.

The plane had crashed in remote and “hostile” mountainous terrain and the specialist investigation team had to be winched in from the Westpac Rescue helicopter.

He said the team also retrieved “certain parts of the plane” to help determine how it crashed.

The plane was located at 7.10pm on Saturday during a search led by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

Mr Wells said the company had been in regular contact with the pilot’s family during the search effort.

“We will be meeting them at the airport and looking after them and providing every support we can for the child that they have lost,” he said.

We will be employing counsellors and psychologists and just making sure our team is OK to fly. We have lost one of our own.

AIRLINES OF TASMANIA MANAGING DIRECTOR SHANNON WELLS