FIRST ON SCENE TO HELP VICTIMS
Boatie saw ‘slow motion’ collision and rushed into carnage
A GOLD Coast boatie who rushed to the scene of Monday’s helicopter disaster has told of the carnage on the sandbank and his chilling premonition just minutes before the crash.
Travis Slatter was enjoying a day on the Gold Coast Broadwater fishing with his family when he saw the helicopters collide and rushed to the sandbank near the Sea World theme park where one chopper lay upside down in a twisted heap as stunned survivors emerged from the badly damaged second aircraft.
He described the frantic scene which unfolded just minutes after he noticed how busy the sky was with helicopter traffic.
“About 10 minutes earlier, I was watching them all coming and going and I thought, ‘It’s so busy, one day one of these helicopters is going to crash’,” he said.
Mr Slatter said the crash appeared to happen almost in slow motion as a chopper taking off from Sea World Helicopters was involved in a collision with one coming in to land.
He immediately sprang into action, joining a handful of people who were on the sandbank when it happened.
“We were only about 100m away so I pulled the anchor up and rushed over there,” Mr Slatter said.
“The collision was so violent, I knew it was going to be bad.”
Mr Slatter ran straight past the dazed and bloodied figure of pilot Michael James, who remarkably managed to land safely on the sand, and headed towards the one where four people lay dead inside.
“I knew I was going to come across carnage, but I knew there would be no medical help there so I just wanted to help if I could,” he said.
“There was debris everywhere and when you got to the chopper, you just couldn’t get in.” Mr Slatter came across a young boy – Leon De Silva – lying on the sand and feared the worst until the nine-year-old Geelong boy moaned.
“I heard him and then I thought ‘s---, there’s some life there’,” he said.
“I stayed with him and another girl came over and she was trying to comfort him, saying, ‘It’s going to be all right’.
“It really hit home for me because he looked around the same age as my daughter.”
Then came the chilling screams of Leon’s mother Winnie, herself badly injured in the crash but somehow still alive.
“She started screaming and someone else was comforting her saying stuff like: “It’s OK, your boy is here, he’s alive”, and then after a few seconds the screaming stopped,” he said.
As Mr James walked past trying to help survivors, Mr Slatter offered to tear up his shirt to make a bandage for a
I knew I was going to come across carnage, but I knew there would be no medical help there so I just wanted to help if I could BOATIE TRAVIS SLATTER
gash on the injured pilot’s hand, but he shrugged it off.
“His hand was all shredded but be said he was all good and he kept on trying to help people,” he said.
Mr Slatter said he was amazed at how Mr James was able to safely land the second chopper, saving the lives of the six people on board.
The owner of a party pontoon moored nearby headed over to the mainland to bring help, while another man yelled in frustration at being unable to dig deep enough to help free the people trapped upside down in the twisted wreckage of the destroyed helicopter.
Another man was frantically pouring water over leaking engine fuel in case the crash sparked an inferno.
Within minutes the scene was swarming with police and paramedics.
“After the crash it all happened so quickly,” Mr Slatter said. “It was strangely less chaotic than I thought it would be, it was a very strange sensation.”
In a twist of fate, Mr Slatter said the helicopters came down in the very spot he often parked his boat for fishing.
“We often pull up right in that spot because the water drops away really deep and it’s good for fishing, so we counted our lucky stars that we chose the other spot,” he said.
He said he had already replayed the events in his mind as he comes to terms with the tragedy.
“I’m OK,” he said. “But you do think: I should have done this or could have done that. But we could only do what we could do with what we had, which was nothing.”