Editorial
Tragedy calls for hard look at Taipan fleet
The presumed deaths of four Australian Defence Force personnel during a training exercise in Queensland is a tragic reminder of the dangers faced by those who risk their own safety for our nation.
Troop Commander Captain Daniel Lyon, Lieutenant Maxwell Nugent, Warrant Officer class 2 Joseph Laycock and Corporal Alexander Naggs were on board a MRH-90 Taipan helicopter when it crashed near Hamilton Island in the Whitsundays on Friday night.
While wreckage of the helicopter has been located, the main fuselage and its occupants have not. Any initial hope that the crew may have survived appears to have faded.
The likely deaths of the four men, all members from the 6th Aviation Regiment from Sydney’s Holsworthy base, would represent Australia’s worst peacetime military accident since 2005, when nine Australian service personnel were killed when a navy helicopter crashed in Indonesia during earthquake relief operations.
Lieutenant General Simon Stuart named the men on Sunday afternoon with the permission of their grief-stricken families. In speaking to the media, Stuart rightly noted that the work of Australia’s defence forces was inherently risky. Over the weekend, Defence Minister Richard Marles also said the accident highlighted the bravery of Australian military personnel, both on the battlefield and during military exercises such as Talisman Sabre, which the crew were involved in. “It’s serious, it is dangerous, and it does carry risk,” Marles said.
He is right. As was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who told reporters in Canberra on Sunday that the crash was “a stark reminder that there are no safe or easy days for those who serve in our country’s name.”
The Herald extends its deepest condolences to the families of the four missing men, and to their Sydney-based colleagues. The focus now is rightly on locating the crew and returning them to their families.
However, attention will and should inevitably turn to what went wrong. The full facts are yet to become clear, but the incident has revived longstanding concerns about the technical problems that have plagued the MRH-90 Taipan.
It is the second incident involving the helicopter this year, after a crash in Jervis Bay in March during a counterterrorism military training exercise. That helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing after an engine failure. Two of the 10 soldiers on board were injured.
Marles confirmed at that time that a decision had been made to replace the helicopters and argued that they had been in use for a “considerable amount of time”. Announcing a decision to replace the European-made helicopters with new Black Hawks and Seahawks from the United States in 2021, then defence minister Peter Dutton said the Taipan had been a “project of concern for a decade” and noted nine instances in which it has been deemed unsuitable to fly.
As the Herald’s Amber Schultz reported on Sunday, since being added to the Australian Defence Force fleet in 2007 the multi-role helicopters have been involved in a number of worrying safety incidents. In 2019, the 47-strong Taipan fleet was grounded after one was forced to land due to a tail rotor vibration. The fleet was also limited on certain missions owing to problems with the auxiliary power unit that prevented the aircraft from shutting down its main engines.
In 2020, 27 helicopters were grounded after cabin sliding door rails were deemed unserviceable. Officials later revealed the doors were too narrow to allow its gun to fire while troops were descending from the aircraft.
The fleet has again been grounded after Friday’s tragedy in the Whitsundays. The cause of the crash is still not known and will likely only become apparent once the full wreckage is recovered and analysed.
But the need for an inquiry into the helicopter and its immediate future is now surely obvious. Such an inquiry should be held publicly and transparently, not just for the four families now grieving their loss, but all families who have loved ones flying in these aircraft.
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