Yesterday morning\u00a0Durham Downs cattle station\u00a0pilot\u00a0Darren Zanker and station mechanic Graham McNamara died instantly when the station Cessna they were in crashed on\u00a0Durham Downs\u00a0(far south west Queensland, between Eromanga and the SA border).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Apparently they were returning from repairing a truck\u00a0at\u00a0Woomanooka\u00a0outstation to the east, and were asked to help look for a couple of horses on their way back.\u00a0 The plane went down just 6-7 km from the Durham Downs\u00a0airstrip, presumably in the Cooper Channels, which are not accessible to vehicles at present due to one of the wettest\u00a0seasons on record.\u00a0 A Santos chopper from Ballera, the nearby oil & gas plant, flew over to help with a nurse on board\u00a0however nothing could be done.<\/p>\n
When I visited Durham a few weeks ago I found it to be one of the happiest camps I’ve ever come across.\u00a0 An accident like this is everyone’s worst nightmare.\u00a0 What a waste, what a tragedy, and my sympathy goes to everyone on the station and everyone nearby who knew these blokes.\u00a0\u00a0Especially the families of the blokes who died – including Graham McNamara’s wife and young baby, who will never now get to know his father.<\/p>\n
The cause of the plane crash isn’t yet know and as S Kidman & Co managing Director Greg Campbell was quoted as saying, there could be any number of causes –\u00a0 ‘some type of medical emergency affected the pilot, mechanical error, an error of judgement, hitting a bird’.\u00a0\u00a0 The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) are investigating the cause of the crash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday morning\u00a0Durham Downs cattle station\u00a0pilot\u00a0Darren Zanker and station mechanic Graham McNamara died instantly when the station Cessna they were in crashed on\u00a0Durham Downs\u00a0(far south west Queensland, between Eromanga and the SA border).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Apparently they were returning from repairing a truck\u00a0at\u00a0Woomanooka\u00a0outstation to the east, and were asked to help look for a couple of horses on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=939"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":944,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939\/revisions\/944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}