Crash led to RAAF worker’s decline

MADONNA Paul’s husband knew there was something wrong with the aircraft he worked on in the Royal Australian Air Force.

That aircraft – the Nomad – was known as the “widow maker”.

Tragically, as Ms Paul explained to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide in Hobart on Monday, that aircraft ultimately – albeit indirectly – took her husband’s life, too.

Ms Paul, who now lives in Tasmania, said her husband Michael took his own life in 2004 in Queensland after a 10-year military career, in which he worked as an aircraft maintenance fitter.

“He’d come home and say this aircraft is dangerous, it shouldn’t be in the air,” Ms Paul said.

“He couldn’t understand how dangerous that aircraft was and it was still able to be flown and still operated.

“Its nickname was the widow maker, and everybody knew it.”

While Michael reported his concerns to his superiors, it continued to be used from their base at the Oakey Army Aviation Centre.

Then one day in 1991, Ms Paul was at work when she was told a Nomad had gone missing. While she got a call later that afternoon saying Michael wasn’t on the plane in question, four people had died – including a fellow aircraft fitter that he’d worked alongside.

Ms Paul said the Australian Defence Force provided no support.

That night, his colleagues went to the pub but Michael said he “couldn’t stomach it” and “felt like he wanted to vomit, so he left”.

After that, her husband would “come home from work and sit in the dark”, with his moods becoming “erratic”.

Meanwhile, Michael withdrew from parenting and his social life, became aggressive, and was unable to cope with noise or the sound of children playing.

After the couple had their second child, Michael left his military career and returned to what he’d done before – working as a boiler-maker – and for a while he enjoyed civilian life.

But things unravelled when he needed to travel on a work trip to Rockhampton on a light aircraft. The plane hit a storm and the passengers on-board were told to brace.

“He had a complete breakdown after that,” Ms Paul said. “He said that he fully had the whole feeling of what would have happened to those four men.”

She said he became “very erratic”, with paranoia and hypervigilance.

After a domestic violence incident, her husband was hospitalised and put on medication that he had a “very strong reaction to”.

With the couple’s children seriously affected, Michael packed up his truck and set up camp at a national park in Townsville.

Things stabilised for a while, with Michael receiving treatment as a veteran from a psychiatrist.

The week before he died, his medication was changed – and a psychiatrist didn’t seem to pick up that Michael was planning suicide.

Before he died, he withdrew a claim against the Defence Force because of the costs it could have left on his family.

Ms Paul said she had since suffered “systemic abuse” at the hands of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs – with the DVA refusing to reinstate the claim, and a delegate telling her she didn’t “deserve any compensation because mental illness just runs in your family”.

“This department is always the monster in the room,” she said.