Matt Wright trial: Chopper crash pilot Sebastian Robinson denies drug trafficking at Outback Wrangler hearing

The star witness at Outback Wrangler host Matt Wright’s criminal trial has denied being a “drug trafficker” or supplying drugs to a visiting football team before a fatal Northern Territory chopper crash.

Chopper crash survivor Sebastian Robinson is giving evidence at Mr Wright’s trial in the Supreme Court at Darwin more than three and a half years after the aviation accident that killed his friend Chris Wilson and left him paraplegic.

The 32-year-old was flying a Robinson R44 owned and operated by Mr Wright’s company Helibrook when it crashed during a crocodile egg collecting mission at West Arnhem Land in February 2022.

Following the crash, Mr Wright was charged with three counts of attempting to pervert the course of justice in relation to the investigation.

The charges relate to allegedly lying to police in a statutory declaration about how much fuel was in VH-IDW’s tank at the crash site, pressuring a witness – Mr Robinson – to falsify flight records and destroying VH-IDW’s maintenance release.

The crown alleges Mr Wright’s motive was fear that crash investigators would discover he had failed to properly maintain the helicopter before the accident.

The 45-year-old Top End tourism operator has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Mr Wright’s defence barrister has been cross-examining Mr Robinson since Wednesday afternoon.

David Edwardson KC has so far quizzed the injured pilot about everything from his recreational drug use to what he told the Australian Transport Safety Bureau from his Brisbane hospital bed.

It has been revealed that NT Police, during their investigation, downloaded the contents of Mr Robinson’s phone and the Cellebrite extraction was ultimately provided to the defence as part of the brief of evidence.

On Thursday, Mr Edwardson began reading Mr Robinson’s text messages out to the jury and suggested the wheelchair-bound pilot had consumed cocaine at a friend’s 27th birthday party two days before the fatal crash.

Mr Robinson said he had “no recollection of going to the party” and did not remember being there.

“I have no recollection of the weeks prior to the accident,” he said.

Mr Edwardson asked Mr Robinson about a text message he sent his girlfriend a month later saying his “last drink was at Ryleigh’s party”.

“In the message it says I had my last drink at Ryleigh’s party on the 26th but my memory, I do not remember being at Ryleigh’s party. I’ve been through a lot of trauma,” Mr Robinson replied.

“After the event I have been told that I did attend Ryleigh’s party.

“I can’t remember even writing this message or having this conversation with my partner. This is a couple of days out of my coma.”

Earlier this week, during examination in chief by crown prosecutor Jason Gullaci SC, Mr Robinson admitted he had used cocaine a couple of times a year in the five years prior to the crash.

“Do you accept that from at least 2018 right through to the time of this accident, you would, from time to time, source cocaine and provide it to your friends and those who wanted to party with you?” Mr Edwardson said on Thursday.

“In effect, I guess so,” Mr Robinson replied.

Mr Edwardson said cocaine “isn’t cheap”.

“So if you source cocaine and then provide it to your friends - presumably you don’t do it for free - they pay you for it?” he propositioned.

“And therefore, when you hand it over to the next person presumably you want to recover the amount you’ve spent on that cocaine at least

“That’s trafficking, isn’t it? And you know it’s trafficking?”

Mr Robinson rejected that it was “trafficking”.

“It’s arranging someone to give someone something else,” he said.

At this point, Acting Justice Alan Blow interjected.

“Look, it is trafficking. Even if you’re not making any money for yourself, if you buy some drugs and pass them on to someone else who reimburses you, that’s trafficking as far as the law is concerned,” the judge told the witness.

Mr Edwardson posited that Mr Robinson knew he was trafficking drugs.

“Well, I didn’t,” he replied. “That’s why the judge had to explain, but I understand now.”

“I understood trafficking as supplying cocaine in large amounts.

“I don’t recall (quantities) but very, very minimal.”

Mr Edwardson ventilated another text message from late 2019 in which Mr Robinson texted a friend.

“Footy players in town and want bags. RJ got any?,” he wrote to a friend.

Mr Edwardson asked him, “Was it Richmond?”, but Mr Robinson said he didn’t recall.

And in April 2020, someone texted Mr Robinson saying, “need to get some bags for the weekend”.

“So what I am suggesting is it’s self-evident from the message, he is trying to get probably a bag, for him, and you’ve been running around trying to find out whether you could get any but you weren’t having much luck?” Mr Edwardson asked.

“I don’t know about running around, but, yes,” Mr Robinson replied.

Mr Edwardson also asked Mr Robinson if he had supplied alcohol to remote Indigenous communities.

He referred to a message a friend had sent Mr Robinson in 2018 asking “What are you taking out there some Charlie?” to which he replied “Nah, just grogs probably”.

“Now were you providing booze to the Indigenous communities at that time in 2018?” Mr Edwardson asked.

“No. I did not,” he said.

“I had taken, on the odd occasion, a small amount of alcohol under the seat to people that have worked out in Arnhem Land.”

Mr Edwardson then played videos from Mr Robinson’s phone including one in which he was sharing rum with an Aboriginal ranger from Maningrida in West Arnhem Land. Mr Robinson said the ranger was a close friend.

In another one he was handling a plastic bottle lid which Mr Edwardson claimed was drug paraphernalia.

“Yeah, it’s a bottle lid with a cone piece in it that people in Maningrida commonly use to smoke marijuana,” the witness replied.

In another video, an Indigenous man offers Mr Robinson a joint, saying “Joint here, you want to smoke with me or what? we got no beer”.

Mr Robinson claimed marijuana “all through Maningrida” and rangers “commonly have marijuana out when they’re out working”.

Another video shows Mr Robinson smoking a wooden pipe but he said “hand on my heart, that is a tobacco pipe”.

Mr Robinson said he was not a marijuana smoker but had used a cannabis vape after the crash.

“I know in rehab that a vape got sent to me for medicinal reasons for the pain, nerve pain,” he said.

On Wednesday, the court heard that Mr Robinson was first interviewed by the ATSB on March 10, 2022, while in a Brisbane hospital.

Prior to the interview he had been served with a notice requiring him to answer questions at the compulsory interview and told they would want access to his phone.

“And that’s why you deleted parts of the phone before the ATSB interview, didn’t you?”, Mr Edwardson asked.

Mr Robinson said “Yes”.

The pilot agreed he was in a “real bad headspace” when interviewed by authorities.

Mr Edwardson put to Mr Robinson – and the witness agreed – that he knew, at the time of his ATSB interview, that it was compulsory to answer questions and to answer truthfully, regardless of whether it incriminated him in some way, and that lying to the ATSB was an offence.

“And did you tell the truth in this interview?” he asked.

“Not in all aspects, no,” Mr Robinson responded.

Mr Robinson told the court that he was trying to answer the ATSB’s questions as truthfully as he could, based on what he could recall at the time but that some of the answers he gave the ATSB were “not entirely true”.

When pressed by Mr Edwardson, he admitted that he had lied about some things to the ATSB due to “the state I was in”.

This included his ability to perform the role of Helibrook’s HAAMC, that the chopper “had no defects” and that he hadn’t been drinking alcohol in the months before the crash.

“I don’t know (why I lied),” he said.

“Obviously I didn’t tell the truth entirely, but you know, I panicked.”

The court heard that during a later police interview, in September 2022 with Detective Senior Sergeant Corey Borton, Mr Robinson confessed to deleting material from his phone before the ATSB interview.

“To be honest with you, I deleted it. I was in a real bad headspace when ATSB were coming to get my phone . . . I don’t know why I did it. I deleted a heap of shit off my phone . . . I didn’t delete much photos. It was just messages with Matt and all that sort of stuff, and OzRunways. I don’t know why I did it . . . I was in a pretty bad way,” Mr Robinson told the officer-in-charge of the police investigation.

During that same interview, Sen Sgt Borton also asked Mr Robinson who fuelled VH-IDW at Mount Borradaile.

“I remember rolling the drum out, and I’m pretty sure the boys landed behind us. This is when I sort of start getting foggy. And usually, like we all land, and we all fuel up together, and go together, you know,” Mr Robinson told the detective.

“I’m pretty sure – yes, we rolled the fuel drum out. And I can’t remember exactly who was pumping in, but usually one person pulls fuel caps up, hold the hose in there and watches, and the other person pumps. And then when you see that float, you know it’s full.

“I can guarantee you, I didn’t run out of fuel. That’s not what caused the accident. I was full from the croc farm and people talk about fuel this and fuel that, but we did not run out of fuel.”

On Thursday Mr Edwardson posited Mr Robinson knew that “if you’d failed to fill up the aircraft, and as a consequence, it ran out fuel and fell out of the sky, the buck would stop with you, wouldn’t it?”, to which Mr Robinson agreed.

“And that must have been a terrifying thought to you?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes, it was a concerning thought, yes,” Mr Robinson said.

“And you knew that, because you were in the pilot seat when that happened, that there was a very real possibility that you might be blamed and ultimately charged with this crash and the death of Willow Wilson?,” the lawyer pressed.

Mr Robinson said “that’s not what was going through my mind at the time”.

“I just did not want to be blamed for running out of fuel when, in my heart, I know that didn’t happen.”

Mr Edwardson also asked Mr Robinson about occasions he let Wilson fly Mr Wright’s helicopters with dual controls.

Mr Robinson accepts Wilson flew from Noonamah to Mount Borradaile on the morning of the crash based on a photo taken during the flight but cannot recall who was flying the final leg of their trip from Mount Borradaile to King River.

Mr Robinson said he knew that “legally speaking” he should not have let Wilson fly VH-IDW on the dual controls because Wilson had not yet received his pilot licence and he was not a flight instructor.

However, he said that Mr Wright had witnessed Wilson on the dual controls many times and Wilson flew on the dual controls with other pilots too.

Mr Edwardson then presented the jury with a group email sent to Wilson and Mr Robinson on January 26, about a month before the crash, in which Mr Wright prohibited Wilson flying on the dual controls as he was not covered to do so under Helibrook’s insurance.

The court heard that prior to the crash, Mr Robinson had performed a range of commercial flying activities using his own helicopters but operating under Mr Wright’s Air Operator’s Certificate.

He would pay Mr Wright a “royalty” for using his AOC to perform jobs including incendiary work, marine survey, firefighting and fire suppression in Arnhem Land.

Mr Robinson said the egg collecting on the day of the crash was planned to be his last job under Mr Wright’s AOC. His resignation letter, dated February 7, had been prepared but not signed or sent to Mr Wright.

Mr Robinson’s cross examination continues on Friday.