Chapter 4

Flight to Hell

Clinton Michael

Clinton Michael eased the control column of the single-engine brown and beige Beechcraft Bonanza to the right, putting the plane into a banking turn. Taking a glance over his right shoulder to catch a glimpse of the runway and windsock below, he could see another plane, which had just landed, still taxiing along the runway back to the parking apron. He decided to wait for a bit to allow it to clear, so he straightened the aircraft, and extended his run a little further away from the small country aerodrome.

As he did, a tiny alarm bell went off in his head, one of those moments you have, when quietly in the back of your mind you know you have just made a bad choice.

It was a sunny Saturday evening, 16 December 1995, and Clinton and his three male passengers were returning to Stawell airport after a one-hour flight over the majestic Grampians range in north-western Victoria. The passengers, Bill Barnaby, Jason Southby and Trevor Hope (not their real names), were state government firefighters newly stationed in the region. They had arranged the flight to get their bearings and to get to know the rocky, mountainous terrain that would be their beat for the summer. A good knowledge of the terrain for a firefighter could save his or her life, and a bird’s eye view is a perfect way to orientate the unfamiliar.

Stawell is at the north-eastern tip of the Grampians, a jagged range of craggy peaks and high plateaus that erupt from the flat plains of western Victoria. They run about 100 kilometres from Dunkeld in the south to Horsham in the north and are a popular tourist destination and national park. The difficult terrain makes bushfires an ever present danger and government fire crews are on hand during the summer to battle any blazes.

There were four other fire crew members in another plane piloted by Clinton’s brother, Jarrod. He had organised the flights for the two teams, and had planned to take them in two one-hour flights on his own. But by the time everyone was organised it was later than expected so Jarrod asked Clinton if he would fly three on another plane and do the flights at the one time.

Clinton wasn’t keen at first. He had other things to do and although he had flown the plane before it was not his. It belonged to the family of his girlfriend at the time and Clinton, now 21, had been using it to get up hours towards his commercial pilot’s ticket. But he decided to help out his brother and the pair took off about 15 minutes apart at about 6 pm, Jarrod going first.

Clinton did the usual pre-flight emergency drill then taxied out onto the north-south runway of the small country aerodrome and took off, heading west towards the giant range. After gaining some altitude he headed south towards Dunkeld at the bottom end of the Grampians where they would then turn back north again to complete the circuit. The crews were excited to be airborne and to be seeing the beautiful landscape in the afternoon sun. It was a good day for flying and it unfolded without incident, the two planes returning within an hour of leaving Stawell.

The airport at Stawell is a modest affair. Carved out of the surrounding bush it comprises two runways, one running east-west, the other north-south, and an assortment of corrugated iron sheds. Like most small country airstrips there is no air traffic control, so when a pilot is approaching to land the procedure is to circle it first to check for other aircraft and wind direction.

Clinton did just that, flying in over the top of the airport at about 600 metres. He checked out the windsock to determine which direction he would land from and seeing the other plane piloted by Jarrod, lengthened his approach.

But as he did the warning bell reminded Clinton of some wise words of one of his flight instructors. It was not so much a golden rule as a rule of thumb. The advice is not in the aviation rulebook, it’s not a requirement, hardly even a ‘must do’; just a handy hint that some pilots always swear by. The tip: while circling during an approach, never make the circle so big that you stray too far from the runway. ‘He told me, “Clinton, always try and stay in gliding distance of an aerodrome, because the only time you don’t do it will be the time something will go wrong.” I wouldn’t know until then how true the words were,’ Clinton said.

The theory goes that if the worst happens and the engine fails, you can at least make a good fist of making the runway and attempting an emergency landing by gliding in.

‘I’ve had a look and worked out I will land from the south. As I’ve come over I’ve seen my brother has landed and is taxiing back along the runway. So I’ve looked at him and thought he will be a little while before he is clear so what I’ll do is I’ll go a little wider to give me a bit more time.

‘The Bonanza is a fast machine and you can cover a lot of ground quickly,’ Clinton said. Having extended his downwind run before the final approach he was further away from the strip than he would normally be. He had a gnawing sense of unease. Out to the west the sun was getting lower and the warm rays brushed over the occupants as they prepared to land.

Then it happened.

One minute the comforting buzz of the Beechcraft’s powerful Continental motor, the next nothing, just the sound of air swooshing gently over the plane’s metal skin, the engine completely silent: every flyer’s nightmare.

‘The engine stopped. Boom. Zilch, nothing. It’s just died,’ Clinton said.

Engine failure on an approach to landing is the worst possible time, if you can imagine anything such as a good time for it. ‘Landing is generally the time you really don’t want things to go wrong,’ Clinton says with classic understatement. ‘You are low, moving relatively slowly and with flaps down and wheels lowered you have the gliding ratio of a brick.’

They were about 1000 metres short of the runway at an altitude of about 150 metres, too far to glide in, while trees and powerlines directly in their path presented a dangerous obstacle to an emergency landing.

‘Things had turned very bad,’ Clinton said.

Later he would reflect on the virtues of hindsight and the exceptions that prove the rules and he would torture himself with that endless futile game of ‘if only’. But hindsight is pretty much barren ground. Sure you can learn from it but as for solving problems as they arise, it’s as elusive as the pot of gold at rainbow’s end.

Right now though he had other things on his mind as his emergency training kicked in. One of the comforting things about emergency procedures training is that you learn them over and over until you don’t even have to think to invoke them. They become lodged in your head and just tumble out like the multiplication tables from a primary school kid when the situation calls for them.

As he fought desperately to keep the plane straight and level, he checked his instruments for a clue on what might be the problem. He tried restarting the engine, without success, ordered his three passengers to take up the emergency landing position as drilled before the flight and tried to send a Mayday call.

 

As a plane loses power, so does it lose its speed, which keeps the air flowing around the wings that gives the lift. It begins to stall and starts to flutter like a leaf before tumbling to the ground. The only way to pick up speed to stop the stall is to drop the nose, which gives you lift, but then the ground begins to loom pretty quickly. Try to fly too flat and the plane quickly loses speed, threatens to stall and topple out of the sky.

The trick is to fly at an angle that will keep you in the air for as long as possible, so you can avoid obstacles and hopefully find a relatively clear place to put down. A crash-landing plane will also stand a better chance of staying together if it is straight and level. A plane that nose-dives or flops onto its side is far more likely to break up and will do far more damage to itself and its passengers than one that lands straight.

Turning around, if the way ahead is not clear, is not an option either, as you will lose speed even more rapidly. So the drill is to do what is called ‘45s’ looking left and right about 45 degrees to see if there is a clearer path. The most you can turn is 45 degrees; any more will mean a rapid loss of speed and a stall. As he struggled to keep control and height, Clinton did not have a lot of options. Inside, everyone remained remarkably calm, more through fear than anything else, and braced themselves for the inevitable.

By this stage Clinton had given up any hope of touching the runway and knew he would not clear the trees, now looming large and fast in front of them. There was nowhere to go. He picked a clump of the smallest saplings he could see and aimed for that, keeping the plane as straight and level as possible. Once he was on top of the clump he pulled the plane up sharply, stalling it so it would flop into the arms of the trees in the hope they would break the fall to the ground.

‘That was the theory anyway and in hindsight it turned out to be the best option.’

As he did all hell broke loose. The plane plummeted, smashing its way through the trees, wings breaking off and the Perspex windows smashing in. The impact wrenched a wing off, sending fuel spraying out like a fountain. The friction of twisting, grinding metal ignited the stream and fire every pilot’s nightmare erupted.

But the trees had done their job, slowing the plane sufficiently and breaking the fall so that the landing had not been too severe. Everyone was alive when it finally settled on the ground. In practice Clinton had done a fantastic job and while the crash was violent, everyone apart from Clinton, who had a gaping hole in his head, was pretty much intact. All this had happened in 15 seconds. But Clinton said it had felt like 15 minutes with everything happening in slow motion.

Clinton was on the left side of the plane, with Bill next to him on the right and the other two in the two rear seats. Clinton and Bill’s escape route was through the front exit on Bill’s right while for the two rear passengers there were escape windows or chutes which they punched out and clambered through. With the plane now well alight, Clinton swung his legs over Bill and kicked frantically at the buckled and jammed front door. After six or so kicks he got it open three-quarters and scrambled out, yelling to Bill to follow.

‘I got to the back of the plane, did a head count and saw two of the passengers were out and were clear of the fire burning at the front. But no sign of the third the chap who had been sitting next to me, Bill. I assumed he was right behind me as he was conscious and there was nothing stopping him from moving. To my horror I turn around and he isn’t there.’

By now the front of the plane was really engulfed in flames with black smoke billowing.

‘And then I heard a scream. The sound of it is something I will never forget. Bill was screaming that loud his voice was distorting I can’t really describe it but it was terrifying.’

Clinton now faced a grim choice. To go back into the flames and try to rescue him, putting himself gravely at risk, or concede he had no chance and leave the passenger to a fiery death. He had to try. He launched himself back into the furnace. As he reached the door again Bill was just emerging from the flaming wreckage. Both men were in the midst of a pyre the flames licking and sashaying at their bodies, their lungs burning from the super-heated air. Clinton shepherded Bill in the right direction towards the back of the plane, guiding him along until they were clear of the inferno.

In those few seconds after Clinton and the others first left the cabin, Bill hadn’t been able to undo the seat belt. In the panic he had forgotten the drill and was pushing down on the buckle in an effort to release it instead of pulling it up. But just as Clinton reached him he had managed to release it and got himself free and was starting to crawl out the door.

Once the men scrambled from the wreckage they made their way to a road 200 metres or so away. Everyone was quite calm although it was more the result of severe shock than any great relief. One of Clinton’s first thoughts was for the plane, thinking his girlfriend’s father was not going to be too happy about his plane being a write-off.

‘I was thinking, how am I going to explain this?’ But other things would quickly preoccupy Clinton’s thoughts. As they all stood there on the roadside, Clinton slowly became acutely aware of his injuries.

 

Jarrod and his passengers had just reached the parking apron when they saw the fireball erupt a few hundred metres away. Hardly believing his eyes Jarrod called emergency services. A small aerodrome like Stawell has no emergency services of its own and Clinton’s Mayday call would have been picked up on the emergency frequency and passed onto fire and ambulance depots in Stawell.

Jarrod leapt from the plane and ran to his car, gunning it down the road out of the airport, while his passengers ran directly through some scrub to the crash site. As Jarrod got closer he saw Clinton and his passengers moving towards the road but thought it was his own passengers who had run across the paddocks to the crash site. At that moment he was convinced that they had all perished, but then he took a closer look and realised it was Clinton and his group. He was overjoyed. The sheer emotion was incredible, Clinton said.

Jarrod told them all to sit down and stay calm and still. When one of Jarrod’s passengers arrived she screamed with horror at Clinton’s gaping head wound. ‘She saw my head, screamed and went white, so it must have been a gruesome sight.’

It was then Clinton had the first inkling of his horrific injuries. He was first aware of his hands. Looking down at them, palms turned up, it looked as though they had been skinned, the flesh all rolled up back to his wrists and the palms just bloody red and raw. The light wind blew on them and quickly he became aware of a stinging pain that may as well have been sandpaper rubbing on his wounds. The pain washed over him like a wave and became unbearable. Up until then he’d been running on adrenaline and doesn’t remember feeling any pain.

‘I was quite numbed. But at that point, that’s when I realised that geez, I’m in trouble here. It started to really hurt. This is not good, I thought.’

At that point Clinton could hear the distant sound of a siren, as the ambulance from Stawell charged down the four kilometres to the airport.

‘I can’t praise the emergency services enough. They were just fantastic. We had no sooner crashed, walked across the paddock and they were there.’

The ambulance officer, Chris Coucill, got Clinton and Bill, the two worst injured, into the ambulance and whisked them off to the bush nursing hospital in Stawell. Trevor Hope was also seriously burned but Jason Southby had only minor burns to his upper body.

The pain for Clinton and Bill by now was excruciating but they couldn’t be given painkillers because there was no doctor present to prescribe them. ‘We had to wait for 40 minutes and all the nurse could do was put on wet towels and ice to try to relieve the pain. I could hear Bill screaming in pain in the next room. I realised then I was also in trouble and this was going to be more than a night in hospital. From then on I started to shake uncontrollably and began to slip into unconsciousness. The doctor eventually arrived and I just remember him giving me the injection, saying you won’t feel a thing.’

Clinton’s body, with massive, full thickness burns to about 40 per cent, began to shut down, his mind slipping into a coma. He had begun a slow descent into oblivion and it would be four weeks before he would emerge, conscious yet barely comprehending, into the real world.

On reflection, the coma was a godsend. To be conscious during this time would have been unbearable, so deep and widespread were the burns. The doctor called for an air ambulance to be sent from Melbourne to transport Bill, Clinton and Trevor to the Alfred Hospital. Bill was assessed as the worst and was loaded first, going in the helicopter, while Clinton was put aboard a fixed-wing aircraft to Essendon and then to be taken by road to the Alfred. But as it turned out Clinton’s state was as critical, if not worse, than Bill’s. Soon after taking off from Stawell, his condition worsened and the paramedics fought to keep him alive. On arrival at Essendon, they had to abort plans for the road transfer to the Alfred for fear he would not survive, and they called back in the helicopter to pick him up.

 

Of all the possible assaults on the human body, burns are probably the most horrific. In some ways they are worse than the worst mechanical injuries. Broken bones, blood vessels and ripped flesh heal and repair quite quickly but burns can leave you with physical, as well as emotional, scars for life.

At first sight burns can be deceptive and belie the horrible damage that lies beneath the surface of the skin, where the nerve endings lie. When these are damaged and exposed by the heat of the burn, they cause terrible pain. But even worse than the pain is the damage they can cause and the terrible complications if burns are deep and widespread.

As the burn deepens it destroys blood vessels, upsetting the body’s delicate fluid balances with a risk of major loss of fluid and electrolytes. If deep enough, muscle and even bones can be damaged. Without quick preventive action a bad burn will continue to burn deeper into the tissues and inflict further damage. Apart from destroying the skin tissue itself, which will leave scarring, the burn also destroys the mass of blood vessels that lie close to the skin’s surface.

Skin is our shield, our defence against the world, protecting us from dehydration, infection and the elements. Burns victims are left vulnerable to massive loss of fluid from their bodies, and infection. With no protective barrier, bacteria can easily colonise the tissues. Infection is in fact the biggest risk from burns. Other repercussions can include respiratory failure from breathing hot gases and loss of body dexterity and movement as scar tissue forms. And beyond the physical legacy is the potential for psychological scars, as the trauma and the changes to your appearance take their toll.

In a sort of irony, the second lot of burns may have actually saved Clinton’s life. According to the surgeon who dealt with Clinton’s blistered glowing body, the burns to his head actually stopped him bleeding to death. Not realising it at the time, Clinton had suffered a massive cut to his head during the crash, the gash that had so disturbed the female passenger. As the plane was smashing its way through the trees, the Perspex window shattered and fragments slashed his face and head from the bridge of his nose right over the crown, opening it up like a tin of sardines.

The wound bled profusely in the minutes following the crash landing, but the flames which engulfed him as he went back for Bill actually cauterised the spurting gaping blood vessels and halted a life-threatening bleed.

‘The surgeon said if I had not gone back into the flames I would have bled to death by the side of the road in about three minutes.’

Clinton received the worst burns on his face, neck, arms and torso, followed by Bill who was burnt on an arm and a leg and the torso. Trevor was burnt on the arm and leg and Jason suffered only minor burns and was released from hospital the following day.

Clinton had received his initial burns in the scramble from the cockpit but much worse followed when he went back into the flames to rescue Bill. He also suffered internal organ damage and both his lungs ended up collapsing later due to the superheated air mixed with flames he had inhaled. Luckily they did not collapse together otherwise it would have been catastrophic.

As Clinton floated in his sea of unconsciousness his parents were being told he would be lucky to survive a few hours. It is notoriously difficult to predict a patient’s chances of survival; it is literally an hour by hour, then day by day proposition. But as each hour passed that Clinton didn’t die, hope grew.

After three days the signs that he could survive began to show. While unconscious, Clinton said he remembers certain snatches of conversation. ‘I could hear people around me. My girlfriend was in America and one of my first recollections was Mum standing over me saying “Clint, hang in there, she is coming home to be with you”.’

But he remembers being so frustrated, wanting to speak but being unable to. ‘They are there trying to get through to you to see if you are awake. You can hear them and you are trying to say “I’m here I’m awake” and you just can’t.’

It’s like being trapped in a dead body. But he was able to communicate in a crude way by body language. The nurses became expert at reading him. ‘They’d say, “Look, Clinton’s hot” by the way I was moving my legs around.’

As the weeks went by he gradually floated towards consciousness. He inhabited a twilight world, unable to distinguish the snatches of reality in a fog of vivid dreams and hallucinations. In his mind he was often up wandering the corridors of the hospital, the nurses chasing him and ushering him back to his bed. But while some of this meandering of the mind could have been drug-induced, Clinton is convinced that he had an out-of-body experience. He sees this as something very real, rather than imagined. He remembers the scene as vividly as if it had happened yesterday. This is his account of it:

‘It’s raining and I’m in a sort of laneway. There’s another laneway in front of me and to my left a downpipe with water spurting out. To my right there is a big brick chimneystack. There’s a dog over the back somewhere ’cause I can hear him barking in the background. About 20 metres down this lane there is a fence with a sign on it and a hedge growing up behind it. I can remember vividly every little detail of this scene.’

Then a month after he had been released from hospital, he had to go back to get a facemask made up for the burns on his head. He got talking to the technician who asked him about his time in intensive care and if he had any out-of-body experiences. So Clinton began describing the laneway. As he described each detail the technician’s eyes widened. When he had finished his description he told Clinton to follow him, leading him outside to the back of the hospital. When he got to a gate he took out some keys and opened it and there in front of him was the exact scene he had experienced in his mind.

‘I said to him, “I was sitting there.” I walked up to the drainpipe and sat beside it, then I looked and to my right there was a smokestack and I can see the hedge with the sign in front of it. Then the technician said there is a guard dog down the back there that barks at night.’

Clinton could not believe it. His memory of that place was exactly as he saw it now and he had never set foot in the Alfred before his accident. He can’t explain it. He understands that hallucinations are common in patients like that, particularly under the influence of drugs he said he used to see pink elephants all the time but this could not be explained by hallucinations or even coincidence: the details matched exactly.

Clinton is no incense-burning, new age hippie. So it makes the account of his out-of-body experience all the more intriguing. He said he has never been a religious person but during that time he came to wonder about the spiritual side. Those who seek meaning in such thoughts might say his vivid experience was Clinton actually crossing over, approaching death, only to get a reprieve at the last minute.

 

Clinton is showing the photos his family took while in hospital, lying unconscious with tubes protruding from his bloated body like spaghetti.

He looks at the photos to remind himself how far he has come. They helped his recovery in just that way during the long months in hospital. When he was getting down about the slow pace of improvement he could look at the pictures and be reminded of his progress.

Four months slipped by before Clinton was well enough to leave hospital; even then he would have to endure months of rehabilitation to recover movement in his body. The burns caused loss of movement in his limbs and a long programme of rehabilitation and further skin grafts were needed.

Today Clinton’s trauma is still evident, with some scarring on his face, body and arms, but apart from that his recovery has been a miracle. While his face bears the unmistakable mottled pattern of a burns victim, he tells his story without a note of bitterness or longing, just a sort of bewilderment and surprise at what cards life hands out. But other aspects of the accident continue to reverberate. His plans to become a commercial airline pilot for a regional airline or even Qantas or the RAAF have been shelved.

If the problems for Clinton and Bill being so badly injured were not bad enough, they were made much worse by one fact: the insurance company refused to pay out for the disaster. Not only were the aircraft’s owners financially hurt by the write-off of their plane, there was no compensation for Clinton and the others for their injuries. As a result, the accident drained any financial security Clinton had, largely because he could not work and there was no compensation from the insurance.

‘As you can see this gave me a hell of a detour. It really did bugger everything. I had a lot of money saved up to do my commercial licence, so financially it broke me basically,’ Clinton said.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau conducted an investigation into the accident. It said it could have been a fuel problem. But the findings were inconclusive. The bureau found absolutely no problem with Clinton’s handling of the situation and found no evidence of any breach of rules.

Even though Clinton had all the necessary licences and was endorsed to fly that particular plane, the insurers still refused to pay out one cent. As far as Clinton believed the policy should have covered them and the plane. But the insurers used the fact that Clinton was not actually named on the policy as a technicality to block a payout. Ironically, the new policy due to be renewed two weeks after the accident was sitting on the kitchen table at the owner’s place with Clinton’s name on it.

 

Clinton has given up looking back to see if there was anything else he could have done to have avoided the accident. ‘Believe me I’ve been kicking myself the last few years thinking, “If I’d only done this or if I’d only done that.” But that’s the beauty of hindsight isn’t it?’

And what if he had heeded his instructor’s words? He could have climbed a little higher rather than flying our further as he waited for his brother. But whether it would have made any difference in the end is a moot point. The engine would still have cut out anyway. The only difference would have been he would have been a bit higher and a bit closer which may have put him on the runway rather than the trees. There would still have been a crash and whether the outcome would have been any better no one will ever know. The fact is Clinton did get the plane on the ground without loss of life. A pretty remarkable outcome in anyone’s book.

Of his act of heroism Clinton is reluctant to accept he did anything extraordinary. There was no internal question of ‘do I or don’t I?’ There was no time to think about the risks. It was an instinctive reaction. ‘I really didn’t think twice about it. I acted on impulse,’ Clinton said.

But if there was any motivation, it was in the form of an act of duty, pure and simple. ‘At the end of the day I am the pilot in charge of the aircraft and the passengers’ safety. You have got a responsibility and a duty of care. I can’t say I am special. I did what just seemed right. If you heard that man screaming I think most people would do the same thing. I’d like to believe that anyway.’

That sense of responsibility common to many heroes was instilled in the Michael children. Growing up on a farm, Clinton was always taught to be self-reliant and responsible. He had some emergency service training as a Country Fire Authority volunteer in Horsham and had spent time fighting fires in New South Wales in the 1990s, all of which would have added to his sense of leadership and responsibility.

 

The media’s handling of Clinton’s rescue and other people’s reactions after the event reveal an intriguing insight into the way society looks at heroes such as Clinton.

While he lay in hospital and was unable to give his own account, some reports tried to portray his rescue in a slightly different light in the pursuit of a good media story. The story emerged that he had actually pulled Bill out of the blazing wreckage. Clinton is amused that the media tried to portray his acts as a movie-style rescue with him lunging into the cockpit and sweeping Bill up over his shoulder like a Rambo character. That is the version the media would like but Bill had already extricated himself. ‘Realistically if I had sat there and waited he probably would have got out on his own.’

This is an interesting interpretation of Clinton’s that because his going back into the flames did not make any difference to the outcome it does not justify being labelled heroic. But the outcome is irrelevant. What he did was courageous beyond doubt. It was the fact he turned and went back into the fire to rescue Bill, risking his life to do so. That was the act of bravery not whether he had carried him out or not. If Bill had become disoriented and had not known which way was out, Clinton would have been there to direct him in which case he would have saved his life.

Clinton could just as easily say that if it weren’t for his exceptional flying skills none of them would be alive at all. But he doesn’t. His reluctance to accept his act as one of heroism was reflected in the fact he also initially turned down the offer of the Clarke medal. ‘I didn’t feel I deserved it. I actually declined the offer twice. I just wanted to forget the whole thing and move on.’

Clinton felt too much was being made of his act, particularly when Bill and the other two who had been burnt had got no recognition for their survival.

‘Here I am being made out to be some big hero and there’s another two guys that are burnt. They’ve got no recognition of it, I’ve got all this media attention and there’s Bill sitting at home watching it and thinking if it wasn’t for this guy flying the plane I wouldn’t be sitting here with burns.’

Because of that Clinton felt to accept an award would be unfair on the others. ‘Everyone did a good job on the day, they all remained calm in the aircraft, everyone was supportive of each other, everyone did a good job.’

But in the end the decision was not his.

It turned out that the person who recommended him for the award was the assistant commissioner of Victoria Police. He found this out when he received a phone call from the senior sergeant in charge of the Horsham police station, who wanted to know why he wouldn’t accept the award.

‘I was dragged into Horsham police station and got a very stern speaking to.’

Having heard Clinton’s explanation the sergeant appealed to his pragmatism. He said if he could not accept it on face value, that he accept it for the fact it could be good for his career and open some doors for him.

‘He then went on to say I should think about the role model I could be. He said people looked up to people like you and people need people like you in society as an example.’

‘And thirdly you are in a way rejecting all those who have looked up to you, who have supported you and all the people who admired you and appreciated you and wrote you letters of support. So do it for them. If you don’t accept it you are rejecting them. Why not have something good come out of something horrible?’

After that little speech Clinton promised the sergeant he would think about it. He was still not convinced. He went home and discussed it with his family. Given that they would in some ways share the honour, he was inclining towards accepting, but in the end he went to the person who had sowed the misgivings in his mind Bill. He wanted to know what Bill thought about it and that he would not be upset by Clinton accepting it.

‘He said go for it “as long as I get an invite to the ceremony”.’

So with Bill’s blessing, Clinton decided to accept and in 1996 he was presented with the Australian bravery medal as well as the Royal Humane Society’s Clarke silver medal. Clinton is quick to point out he was honoured by the awards and his reluctance to accept them had nothing to do with him not valuing them. It was about his own judgement of himself.

The medals have been small comfort to Clinton in the aftermath of the accident, which has left all four men with huge financial costs for their medical treatment and loss of income, and made worse by the insurers’ refusal to pay out on the accident. Neither were there any other avenues for compensation.

They initially looked at a class action against the insurance company but abandoned the move after legal opinion said they did not have much hope.

‘No one has walked out of this a winner. It’s all been a terrible good deed gone wrong,’ Clinton said.

But rather than be bitter, Clinton remains philosophical. They were victims of the system but he decided to accept it and forget about further legal action. ‘As far as I’m concerned I’ve wiped my hands of it. I don’t want a bar of it any more. I’ve moved on and done other things. I’m happy with life the way it is. We’re all victims. If anyone has reason to be bitter and twisted it’s me. But I’ve moved on.’

He says he is just happy to be alive and to have a great family around to support him.

So what does a fellow who has survived a plane crash do with his life? Retire gracefully and wrap himself in cotton wool knowing he’s probably used up every ounce of luck he ever had?

No. While having shelved his goal to be an airline pilot, Clinton was still passionate about flying and wanted to make a career of it after his accident. Getting back into the air was no problem. He couldn’t fly for a year awaiting medical clearance and the first flight he took at the controls was over the crash site with the Transport Safety Bureau. This was necessary for its investigation and it was virtually a replica of the flight that day, demonstrating to the bureau investigator what happened at each step. It was a difficult flight but Clinton refused to be daunted.

‘I felt comfortable straight away.’

Every dollar Clinton earned in the six years after the accident went into his flying getting the hours up to qualify for his agricultural pilot’s licence. A grant of $6,000 from the Queen’s Trust for Young Australians also helped his cause along and eventually his determination to succeed paid off. In defiance of the stats which puts his occupation at the top of the risk ladder, Clinton, now based in Naracoorte, flies helicopters at low altitude spraying crops. He laughs at the absurdity of it. ‘You’re flying low, you’re flying slow, you’re flying heavy, which is extremely challenging at the best of times.’

Clinton said he had no hesitation going back to flying. It was pointless trying to wrap yourself up in cotton wool. Despite the potential dangers Clinton believes he has got the risks nailed down and as long as you do it by the book you will be OK. He finds his flying is now more cautious because the thought of something similar happening is always there in the back of his mind.

After years of hard work in the air, Clinton is now a part owner of the aerial spraying business and he is more than happy with his lot. He has always harboured ambitions to fly for search and rescue and has hopes it might still be possible. He feels it would be one way to repay the debt he owes to all those who helped him make it through the most challenging period of his life.

‘If I could end up helping others by being a search and rescue pilot, it really would be a fairytale ending,’ Clinton says with a grin.