Plane crash victim David Ferrier’s family finally clears the air

David Ferrier was on a secret mission with business associates when he died in a plane crash. It’s taken 30 years to unravel the mystery.

Isobel Ferrier in Brisbane. It has been 30 years since her father died in the Wondai plane crash. Photo: Glenn Hunt

A wonderful thing happened after Isobel Ferrier decided to look for answers to the questions that had nagged and nagged her about the plane crash that killed her father three decades ago.

She was a woman of 44, accomplished career-wise, the mother of two children, and she had read all that had been written about the black night of July 26, 1990, when Beech King Air E90 VH-LFH speared into the ground outside the town of Wondai in southeast Queensland, leaving five dead.

But it wasn’t enough. The media said her dad, David, had been on a secret mission to the state’s far north with a group of business associates, three of whom died alongside him and pilot Tony Hammett, a former army brigadier renowned as a stickler for by-the-book safety.

What could the mystery be? And why was her father, a solicitor from Sydney’s North Shore, mixed up in it?

Then there were the stories of lone crash survivor Jim Della-Vedova and passenger No 6, Rayham Francis — who fortuitously got off the plane at Wondai and watched in horror as it went down moments after takeoff.

Ferrier wondered how they had coped with the grief that burdened her teenage years. She had never met the families of the other victims and was intrigued to know what had happened to them. Her mother, Louise, a kind woman left to rear four girls after David’s death, couldn’t bring herself to speak much of the accident and as the years passed her eldest daughter’s curiosity only deepened.

“I was 14 when it happened and it was such a huge event for me,” Ferrier says. “With a tragedy like that, people just try to keep going with their lives and things aren’t talked about as much as they could be or should be, especially when younger kids are involved.

“Certainly, that was the case for my family. I can understand why: everyone was trying to do the best they could. But for me, personally, it became a very long journey of processing all that grief and healing because I didn’t get what I needed, as lots of people don’t in those circumstances.”

So she seized the opportunity of the 30th anniversary of the crash on Sunday to reach out — not just to those bereaved by the death of a loved one in the doomed plane, but to people on the ground, first responders and locals who dropped everything and rushed to help when a fireball lit up the starry sky.

She started by sending out cautiously worded emails and messages to those she could trace from the official record and newspaper articles of the day. Would they share with her what they knew of the crash and its aftermath? Ferrier said she understood if the ask was too great; she didn’t want to add to anyone’s pain. Encouragingly, the answer was mostly yes.

On a whim, she decided to call in to Australia All Over, the bush telegraph operated every Sunday morning on ABC radio by Ian “Macca” McNamara, connecting listeners from Broome, WA, to Burnie, Tasmania, and all points in between. The replies flooded in.

Ferrier was moved to discover so many other lives had been profoundly affected, often in quite unexpected ways. Conversation by conversation, she pieced together a picture of what had happened.

It could never be complete, of course. Some things remain unknowable — such as what was said and done by the pilot, Hammett, in those critical 11 seconds between lifting off the tarmac and plummeting to earth. In the absence of a black box flight recorder (not required for that aircraft type), crash investigators concluded the 55-year-old aviator probably lost his bearings in the darkness due to a phenomenon called somatogravic illusion, causing him to believe the plane was climbing when, lethally, the opposite was the case.

But as it turned out, there was a perfectly straightforward explanation for her father’s presence. One of his legal clients, Sydney businessman Jim Brady, had been putting together a deal to set up a game meat business on the Atherton Tablelands in far north Queensland. David Ferrier, 46, had joined Brady, 50, fellow Sydneysiders Della-Vedova, 41, and accountant Peter Weir, 53, agronomist Ken Newton, 59, of Gympie, Queensland, and Francis, a grazier who lived near Wondai, to inspect a property near the town of Mareeba. The trip was hush-hush because Brady was considering a public offering to float the venture.

The chartered plane landed at Wondai soon after 9.30pm on the return leg to let off Francis and refuel. The night was fine but moonless, going to why Hammett would become disorientated while taking off with the remaining passengers.

Local man Winston Burrows came out to the aerodrome to pump the Avgas. He vividly remembers his interaction with Hammett and the other men, who had climbed out to stretch their legs. The pilot, meticulous as ever, checked seals on the fuel drums before topping up the aircraft’s reserve tanks for the 2½-hour hop to Camden outside Sydney.

Burrows was chatting with Francis when Hammett fired up the big, noisy twin prop engines and nosed the King Air on to the runway. They waited while the plane idled at the foot of the strip. Francis observed: “Everything has to be just right with Tony.”

Finally, the plane thundered into the sky about 10.45pm. “They will be back in Camden by 1.30am,” Burrows said. Instead of climbing away, it was barely 21m above the runway when it began a “shallow descent”, according to the crash investigation.

Whatever went wrong happened in the blink of an eye. No sooner had Hammett made a routine radio call to report he was airborne than he was in the trees. The airspeed was 183 knots (339km/h) on impact, ripping the aircraft apart before the fuel exploded.

Della-Vedova, the only survivor, was seated behind the cockpit in an aft-facing seat. His life may have been saved by his failure to fasten the seatbelt. He was either hurled clear of the wreckage or scrambled free — he couldn’t say which — with severe injuries, including burns to 20 per cent of his body.

The poor man would have died at the scene had help not reached him. But nothing could be done for the five victims — Hammett, Brady, Weir, Newton and David Ferrier.

Burrows’s training as a volunteer firefighter had kicked in. He called out his mates in the town brigade along with the ambulance and the police. He could hardly believe it when he saw Della-Vedova leaning against a tree, tended by the town doctor. How anyone could have escaped the inferno was beyond him. The first of the “what-ifs” that would play out in the years to come was running through his mind. Could the fuel have been contaminated?

Thankfully, his fears were soon put to rest. One of the crash investigators slipped word to him that the Avgas Hammett had taken on in Wondai would not have been fed into the engines until deep into the flight: it wasn’t a factor.

“I could have kissed him,” Burrows remembers.

Isobel Ferrier was on a school camp when her mother phoned with the awful news. “I just screamed, that’s all I could do,” she says. “I had this strong, visceral reaction I couldn’t control … I was probably in shock for a very long time. It felt like I was in a haze. I think it was only after I went away to university that I got control of my life.”

She studied music and became a professional violinist, married, had the kids now aged 11 and nine, and last year moved to Brisbane to take over as state manager of Musica Viva, a provider of live chamber music and music education in schools.

She now realises that knowledge is power, and her journey of discovery was enriched by the connections she made along the way. “I don’t want to convey the impression that it’s been a terrible 30 years for me and my family, with everything swept under the rug,” Ferrier says.

“It’s not like that. It’s just what families do … they get through tragedies as best they can. My view has been for a long time that even though my dad dying was a horrible thing, I wouldn’t really change it because it made me a stronger person.”

Some of the other families struggled, though Ferrier is reluctant to share the details out of respect for their privacy. Ken Newton’s son, Gordon, tells Inquirer that his father’s life insurer refused to pay up, plunging them into financial crisis.

His mother was a rock. “Obviously it hit her, but she just cracked on,” Gordon says. Yet as the bills piled up she had to let go of their dream to work a going mixed farm concern outside Gympie, in southern Queensland, selling the holdings until little more than the homestead was left.

Rayham Francis’s wife, Ina, was at the airstrip that night to pick him up. After the crash, she did what she could for critically injured Della-Vedova while Francis went to look for the doctor. They, too, got on with their lives. Since her husband’s death, Ina, 92, has lived in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane.

Della-Vedova recovered from his injuries and forged a friendship with Wondai police sergeant Graham Pollock, the emergency response commander, that endured for the rest of their days. On his death in 2015, Della-Vedova was mourned as a pillar of his community.

Ferrier says she was touched that not only did people open up to her, they nearly always thanked her for contacting them, such was their desire to share their experiences. “It’s surprising how often when you create an opportunity for connection people do really appreciate that,” she says. “They wanted to help me and they also wanted to tell their part of the story.”

Accompanied by her mother, she will travel to Wondai on Sunday to attend a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the tragedy at the small stone memorial on the accident site. Of all the conversations Ferrier had, the one that left her in tears was with Indigenous elder Eric Law, a proud Wakka Wakka man.

He told her the crash was the “making” of the community because it brought people together, and that was something no one who was there would ever forget. She should know that the spirits of his ancestors would be walking with her and Louise, sharing the load, when they visited the scene this weekend.

“I feel like I am in a place where all of a sudden the sadness has fallen away and what I have now got is an appreciation for the relationships I have built over time because of my dad’s death,” Ferrier says.

“I don’t want to be glib and say, ‘this is what happens after 30 years, you turn out OK’, because it is really not like that for everybody. But for me, I feel quite settled. That’s what this process has taught me: when you own these really difficult experiences and you come to them on your own terms, instead of letting them control you, then wonderful and beautiful things can happen.”