Opinion: Avalon staff saved a man’s life

The reaction was one of shock and confusion. I heard multiple people shout: “He’s crashed”, but most simply went silent. As I ran back to the Media Centre to get my laptop, I saw girls crying and screaming. As far as the masses were concerned, there was simply no way Collins could have made it.

But while the audience on the runway let emotions take over, Avalon staff sprang into action. Immediately, all flying was suspended, as emergency services rushed to save him.

Meanwhile, the woman on the microphone calmly explained the situation and asked parents to take a moment to speak to their children. She also urged people not to post footage – or, in fact, anything – about what they’d just seen on social media. Remarkably, even after an hour, I didn’t spot a single tweet that anything had happened. I’d never felt more proud to be a recently minted Australian resident.

It also occurred to me right then that while this may have been an unlikely incident, the response would have been meticulously planned over and over and over again by the event’s staff and emergency response teams.

It sounds perverse, but in aviation, the vast majority of training recruits in all sectors receive is for the million-to-one chance something goes wrong. I remember visiting Virgin Australia’s cabin crew training centre to be hoisted a huge manual by one of their teachers. “They have to learn all of this before they can start,” she barked at me. Perhaps more simply, I remember my old friend Chris, who co-hosted our podcast but worked as a flight attendant for years – wryly pointing out that there was a lot more to his old job than just chicken or beef.

An hour or so after the aircraft went down, the woman on the microphone told the crowds that Collins was alive. In bad shape, admittedly, but she told everyone, in a critical but stable condition. And then I realised that for that miracle to happen, lots of outstanding people had to suspend their emotions and let their training take over.

Take Collins himself. We still have no idea exactly what happened, but it certainly seems like his quick thinking took over, and he was able to – somehow – avoid his aircraft crashing nose-first into the ground at the last minute, pulling up to almost nail a horizontal landing.

How did he do that? Sure, there were years of experience, thousands of stunts, and gut instincts that he developed. But it was also because of how seriously his team’s owner, Paul Bennet, takes aviation safety. I know because I interviewed him about his decision to let his son fly for his team only a month before.

He told me the decision only came about because he proved he could do it and forced him to reach the same sky-high (excuse the pun) standards as anyone else. I also watched the group, including Collins, practice their display repeatedly before they even got into the aircraft.

The mentality holds true for the emergency services, who would have had procedures in place to manage this exact eventuality. Within moments of the incident, he was being attended to and, minutes after that whizzed to a nearby hospital. From dragging a pilot out of a cockpit safely to managing those vital seconds after impact, every action of those responders would have been learned so obsessively as to become second nature. Those in the aviation sector call in the Swiss cheese model of safety. Every eventuality has a backup plan, and a backup plan if the first point of response goes wrong.

As I sat in the media room attempting to write up a brief story on what had happened, I realised just how proud the whole industry should be of this. Aviation is arguably – no, undoubtedly – the safest dangerous profession in the world. A sector that involves hurtling humans at hundreds of kilometres per hour around the world is now so mundane that those who are frightened are seen as slightly crazy. And when things do go wrong, accidents are investigated by our ATSB over the years in reports that often stretch to tens of thousands of words.

Avalon is an important reminder, then, that aviation really is the best in the world at what it does.