Miraculous Survival Of Celebrity Auctioneer

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday December 26, 2008

Peter Hawkins and Jano Gibson

UPSIDE DOWN and injured in the mangled wreckage of his single-engine Cessna 172, Scott Kennedy-Green managed to reach for his UHF radio.

"Crashed aeroplane. Anyone copy?" the renowned Sydney auctioneer pleaded from the side of a steep ravine, as his brother-in-law, Matthew Green, 32, bled heavily beside him.

After a carefree day spent mustering cattle in Mudgee, the men were returning to the family's Glen Innes farm for a Christmas Eve dinner, when thick fog set in and the small aircraft slammed into rugged mountains in the Coolah Tops National Park, north-west of Merriwa, in the Great Dividing Range.

It was about 4.30pm, but it would take a further 18 hours - during which his wife, Angela, and two children, waited anxiously for news - before the chief auctioneer at McGrath Estate Agents was spotted by a search team.

"He is extremely strong physically and mentally and there's no doubt that would have helped him deal with the situation overnight," his boss, John McGrath, said after visiting Mr Kennedy-Green at Westmead Hospital last night.

"He was quite heavily sedated [but] in reasonable physical condition under the circumstances. Obviously [he is] devastated at the loss of his brother-in-law."

Mrs Kennedy-Green said she was too distraught to talk about the accident. "We are still trying to come to terms with what's happened. I can't get my head around that," she said.

Her uncle, who did not want to be named, said it should have been a routine trip for the men.

"It's been quite a horrendous day. We were notified yesterday afternoon that there had been a crash. No one has had any sleep. Angela's lost her brother and her husband is in hospital," he said.

He said it was not a journey the pair made often as it was a new property for Mr Kennedy-Green.

"We were having a family holiday up here for a week and Scott and Matthew had gone down for a day trip just to move some cattle and they were on their way back," he said.

Truck driver Col Doer said he was delivering diesel at a mine site near Mudgee when he received Mr Kennedy-Green's distress call on his UHF radio.

"I heard this come over the radio. 'Crashed aeroplane. Anyone copy?'. I thought it was quite surreal, a shock," he said.

"He was short breathed. I thought at first it was a joke, but then a couple of minutes later the same message came over again. So I said 'Copy, the crashed plane, what seems to be the problem?"'

Mr Kennedy-Green told Mr Doer he had crashed about 35 kilometres south-west of Tamworth on the 380-kilometre flight from Mudgee to Glenn Innes. An initial search by police, paramedics, the Volunteer Rescue Association and helicopters failed to find the plane.

"He started telling me he got into some difficult weather, bad fog, hit this mountain and that his partner was bleeding severely from the head. He said he was bandaging him up and that he himself thought he had a broken leg and dislocated shoulder," Mr Doer said.

Mr Doer asked if he had a GPS or beacon and then called Tamworth police station.

"He couldn't answer me. I'm not sure if he didn't know or I think he was a bit disoriented, to be honest.

"He then gave me a phone number for a farm where he was going and told me that his mother-in-law and wife were there waiting for him and asked if I could ring them," Mr Doer said.

The truck driver said he then lost the signal, which another truckie picked up.

A CareFlight spokesman said they were alerted to the wreckage by a property owner and were able to search the area when cloud lifted shortly before 10am yesterday.

"The plane had gone into trees, broken through them and landed upside down with one of its wings ripped off. The right wing was off and the tail was bent up. It was pretty isolated out there," air crewman, Steve Hughes said.

He said when crews arrived there were two people lying beside the plane waving, both thought to be survivors from the crash. But it was later confirmed one was the pilot and the other was someone who managed to get there on foot.

Mr Kennedy-Green grew up in north-western NSW, where he learned to be an auctioneer while working at cattle saleyards in Walgett.

He wanted to be a stock and station agent but because of a lack of jobs ended up getting work at Pickles auction house in Sydney. In 2006, he won the Australasian Real Estate Institute's Auctioneering Championship. He is believed to be an experienced pilot.

In another aircraft accident yesterday, a man died after his light plane clipped a power line and crashed into a paddock in south Gippsland, Victoria.

Last week a light plane crashed into a house in Casula in Sydney's south-west, killing a trainee pilot and an instructor.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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