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| Mountain ranges/ cloudy / foggy | Music | 01:11 |
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| MARSHALL: The rugged terrain and unpredictable weather can make flying in Papua New Guinea the ultimate test for any pilot. | 01:20 |
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| Negotiating the country’s fog clad mountains all too often ends in disaster. | 01:29 |
| Crash photos | Many have perished over the years, but the all important question – what caused these accidents – is rarely answered. SIDNEY O’TOOLE: [Senior Air Crash Investigator] In recent years | 01:42 |
| O’Toole. Super: | we’ve had two fatal accidents we’ve never got on the ground to. Fatal. Now that would be unheard of anywhere in the world. | 02:00 |
| Crash photo | MATHEW IPATU: I see the bits and pieces and I am | 02:14 |
| Ipatu | very sad and I’m upset that it shouldn’t be here. | 02:19 |
| Crash photo | COLIN WEIR: [Aviation auditor] The information that should have been analysed | 02:27 |
| Weir. Super: Colin Weir | from each of those accidents is now not available to us to prevent further accidents and that is a very, very serious issue. | 02:31 |
| Various planes | MARSHALL: We throw the spotlight on an aviation industry in crisis. It’s the backbone of Papua New Guinea’s transport system, but in the last decade, aviation safety standards have nose-dived. | 02:46 |
| O’Toole | SIDNEY O’TOOLE: In my opinion it’s fallen off the edge. | 03:07 |
| Crash site. Burned out plane |
| 03:12 |
| Mt Hagan main street | MARSHALL: Mount Hagen is in the heart of the PNG Highlands where tribal wars are still fought and unemployment runs high. Few here get the chance to be passengers on planes, let alone fly them. | 03:18 |
| Patrick Kundin’s tomb. Parents visit | Not far from the ransacked shops is a tribute to one of the town’s favourite sons. His mother and father pay him a daily visit. At 27 years old, Patrick Kundin was a pilot and the pride of his family. | 03:38 |
| Photo. Patrick | GLEN KUNDIN: [Patrick’s father] He was one of those very rare sons. I raised him up. | 04:08 |
| Patrick’s parents. Super: | He never failed me right from pre-school right up to high school and the flying school. He never failed me. | 04:12 |
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| MARSHALL: Did he really enjoy flying into those remote places? | 04:18 |
| Patrick’s mother looks through photos | VERONICA KUNDIN: [Patrick’s mother looking through photo album] Yes he did. He did. He really liked flying. | 04:20 |
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| MARSHALL: Patrick Kundin’s aviation star was indeed on the rise. He was on his way to becoming an international pilot when tragedy struck. VERONICA KUNDIN: They rang around 6.30 in the night | 04:23 |
| Patrick’s parents. Super: | and they said did you know the plane went down? Sorry… [upset]. | 04:35 |
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| MARSHALL: [To upset mother] It’s okay, take your time. | 04:46 |
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| Music | 04:49 |
| Photos. Crashed plane/ Body bags | MARSHALL: Veronica Kundin was told her son’s plane had plunged into the East New Britain jungle. Both Patrick Kundin and his co-pilot were killed. VERONICA KUNDIN: I said no it can’t be. | 04:51 |
| Veronica | Just after that I did not know what happened to him. I didn’t know. Still today I don’t like to talk about it. | 05:10 |
| Photos. Crashed plane | MARSHALL: The crash happened more than 18 months ago, yet the Kundin family are still waiting for the cause of the accident to be determined. SIDNEY O’TOOLE: I feel for the family. | 05:31 |
| O’Toole. Super: | There is no closure to this and because due process has not been allowed to take place from within our department, I would venture to say that, sadly, it never will be. | 05:45 |
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| MARSHALL: Sidney O’Toole has been investigating accidents in PNG since the 1980’s. | 06:09 |
| Photo. Crashed plane | He’s upset at the falling standards. SIDNEY O’TOOLE: I think from | 06:14 |
| O’Toole | around the middle to the late ‘80s, I think it’s been on a downhill trend ever since. | 06:20 |
| Various plane shots | MARSHALL: Information gathered from air crash investigations is vital in preventing further accidents. But it’s not just one or two accidents. Over the past few years no less than 19 crashes have only been partially or not investigated at all, leaving the families of the deceased angry and demanding answers. | 06:29 |
| Helicopter take off. Jungle below | The isolation of the people below brings home just how important aviation is to their survival. In some parts, people have to walk four days to the nearest medical facility. | 06:55 |
| Photo. Leslie | For many years, Australian pilot, Ian Leslie, crisscrossed these valleys and rivers delivering goods to the locals – until one day he didn’t come home. | 07:13 |
| Mountain crash site from helicopter | The Victorian’s single engine Cessna slammed into the mountain here four years ago. | 07:27 |
| Crash site | Ian Leslie’s body was recovered, but the wreckage wasn’t. MATHEW IPATU: I called them | 07:35 |
| Ipatu | four times every month and they never, they said they will come, they will come and they never come. | 07:43 |
| Ipatu looks at plane wreck | MARSHALL: Mathew Ipatu thought of Ian Leslie as a father. Both he and the Leslie family in Melbourne are still in the dark as to why he died. MATHEW IPATU: They forget Ian Leslie and they have done nothing | 07:54 |
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| and they never take the wreckage out and they never complete his report. | 08:09 |
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| MARSHALL: Air crash investigators did actually visit the site, | 08:15 |
| Villagers with Ipatu | but when they arrived, local villagers demanded ten thousand dollars for guarding the wreckage. | 08:19 |
| Village man | VILLAGER: We built a fence around the plane wreckage and watched over it. Then we waited for the Department of Civil Aviation to come along. | 08:27 |
| Village men | SIDNEY O’TOOLE: This is happening virtually on every accident. | 08:39 |
| O’Toole. Super: | I get surrounded by 15 or 20 people who are all armed, right, demanding very large amounts of cash out of me on the spot and yeah it’s pretty intimidating. | 08:43 |
| Ipatu looks at plane wreck | MARSHALL: The last time Mathew Ipatu was here, Ian Leslie’s plane was still in one piece. Now after four years, it’s been plundered by villagers. Wings lie in gardens, while the engine block rusts away in an empty field. MATHEW IPATU: All the wreckage has been gone | 09:04 |
| Ipatu | and I don’t know what the Department of Civil Aviation is going to do. | 09:25 |
| Village kids on plane wreck | MARSHALL: The fact of the matter is investigators have no money to do anything. | 09:38 |
| Ipatu leaves in plane | Air crash investigations are an expensive business, some exceeding a million dollars depending on how isolated the accident site. But it’s not just a cost issue. Insiders say it’s a combination of corruption and incompetence. | 09:48 |
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| These problems are widely talked about in the aviation industry, but few people are willing to speak publicly about it. | 10:08 |
| Plane leaves | There seems to be a culture of fear within the industry here. One insider told us that if he spoke to us, he feared the government would revoke his visa. The government admits aviation has been neglected. | 10:16 |
| Polye. Super: | DON POLYE: [Transport Minister, PNG] There’s been insufficient funding for such works to upkeep the maintenance of our airports and airstrips throughout Papua New Guinea, not only in aviation, but in other sectors as well. | 10:31 |
| Airport. | Music | 10:46 |
| Planes land and take off | MARSHALL: In the past seven years, air crashes in PNG have killed 16 people. The air safety investigation branch is cash strapped and virtually grounded. Worse still, investigators have no legal clout to do their job. With the introduction of a new civil aviation act several years ago, an accident investigation commission should have been established, but that hasn’t happened. | 10:50 |
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| SIDNEY O’TOOLE: We have no legal mandate to do anything. In other words, we can’t legally go to an accident site, we can’t interview people, we can’t recover items off an aircraft for further work. | 11:22 |
| O’Toole | So if we have a major prang here, right, we can’t do a damn thing. | 11:36 |
| Meeting at home with Kundins | MARSHALL: And as the Kundin’s discovered, even if Sidney O’Toole’s team investigate accidents, the findings would have no legal standing in court. And that’s why the Kundin family is now suing the government for negligence. | 11:48 |
| Polye. Super: | DON POLYE: I’m very sorry. I’m sorry for the families who lost loved ones in those crashes. I must say that it was the slackness on the part of the system in getting the air investigation commission and the structure established. | 12:05 |
| Photos. Crash site | MARSHALL: The Kundin family launched its own investigation visiting the crash site, taking photos and witness statements. | 12:27 |
| Airlink sign | Patrick Kundin’s employer, Airlink, had a poor safety record. After four crashes in seven years, it ceased operating. The Kundins remain convinced Patrick’s crash was not pilot error. | 12:38 |
| Patrick’s parents | GLEN KUNDIN: He has experienced a few of his flights where the engine failed, and he managed to land it, and now you are telling me that it’s pilot error. No, no he’s the best pilot and I lost him, I lost him. | 12:56 |
| O’Toole. Super: | SIDNEY O’TOOLE: Now those crew, two crew, knew that they were in a lot of trouble, and they would have been screaming ‘Mayday, Mayday’ and you know, all this sort of thing. There’s absolutely, unarguably, no question about it. | 13:18 |
| Audio tapes play | MARSHALL: But once again the aviation safety system broke down. Four days after the crash, Sidney O’Toole asked the transmission centre for the recordings of the pilot’s distress calls but he was told the tapes had already been reused. Instead of having the required 65 tapes to save two months of recordings, the centre had only four. | 13:34 |
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| SIDNEY O’TOOLE: Can you imagine what the crew could have told us? | 14:01 |
| O’Toole | Now that information is gone forever. | 14:06 |
| Plane maintenance | See an accident is not one event right? An accident is a chain of events. But if you interrupt that chain of events, you’ll prevent an accident from happening, | 14:12 |
| O’Toole | you may finish up with an incident. That’s the difference. | 14:26 |
| Mt Hagen airport | MARSHALL: Mt Hagen is one of PNG’s busiest hubs and the country’s second international airport, | 14:36 |
| Fire drill at airport | but the facilities and support are inadequate. It’s drill time for the airport firemen. The crew have new uniforms, but their truck donated by AusAid, is old and often breaks down. And that’s not the only problem. | 14: |
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| How many fire-fighters do you have at the moment? | 15:11 |
| Fireman | FIREMAN: At the moment we have 4 firemen, with one vehicle on two shifts. | 15:14 |
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| MARSHALL: Is that enough manpower to handle an accident here? | 15:21 |
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| FIREMAN: If I can rescue one man or two then we will have 70 or 80 passengers will be burned alive. | 15:26 |
| Weir. Super: | COLIN WEIR: If they have a major accident with a F100 or Dash 8 with fifty passengers on board, it would be catastrophic because you simply don’t have the manpower to deal with that accident as we saw with Yogyakarta. | 15:33 |
| Passengers disembark Mt Hagen airport | MARSHALL: Mt Hagen airport is no better prepared than Yogyakarta, and Sidney O’Toole predicts it won’t be long before a major accident exposes PNG’s failures. That’s why he’s speaking out. | 15:51 |
| O’Toole | SIDNEY O’TOOLE: I don’t do this job for the good of my own health, but someone has to make a stand somewhere you know? Well someone has to. MARSHALL: That’s a feeling | 16:10 |
| Glen Kundin | the Kundin family know all too well. GLEN KUNDIN: Steve, this is a life we are talking about! There must be an investigation, we must get to the bottom of it. We must know and we must inform the immediate families. Whether it is a technical fault, whether it is pilot error, these things have got to be known. | 16:25 |
| Parents at Patrick’s tomb |
| 16:50 |
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| VERONICA KUNDIN: There’s not a moment in my life that I don’t think about him | 17:00 |
| Veronica Kundin | and I think that is all I can say now. | 17:07 |
| Memorial to Patrick | Music | 17:13 |
| Credits: | Reporter: Steve Marshall Camera: Geoffrey Lye Editor: Bryan Milliss Producer: Mary Ann Jolley | 17:25 |