The mother of a pilot badly injured in a helicopter crash has vehemently denied she and her family concocted claims against reality-TV star Matt Wright to protect her son.
Wright, the star of Outback Wrangler, is on trial in Darwin Supreme Court having pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempting to pervert the course of justice.
The charges follow the helicopter crash in February 2022 that killed Wright’s friend and co-star Chris “Willow” Wilson on a crocodile-egg collecting mission in the Northern Territory’s Arnhem Land.
Pilot Sebastian Robinson, 32, was left a paraplegic after the crash.
The charges do not relate to the cause of the accident and the prosecution does not allege Wright is responsible for the crash, Wilson’s death or Robinson’s injuries.
Wright has been accused of trying to get Robinson to fake flying-hour records because he was concerned crash investigators would find out he and his pilots had disconnected flight-time meters and faked paperwork.
On Tuesday, Robinson’s mother, Noelene Chellingworth, told the jury Wright visited her son in Royal Brisbane Hospital 11 days after the crash.
She said Wright asked her son to move flying hours from the crashed helicopter to Robinson’s machine.
“Sebastian said that he would think about it,” she said, but when Wright visited two days later her son told him he was “not comfortable” moving hours and declined to do so.
Chellingworth said she saw Wright standing over her son at his bedside telling him to “delete, delete, delete” messages on his phone.
When she asked Wright why he was making demands of her son she said he “fobbed me off”, saying “he’s just cleaning up stuff”.
She said she got the feeling Wright wasn’t really concerned about her son.
In cross examination, senior defence counsel David Edwardson KC asked Chellingworth if Wright had not asked Robinson to transfer flying hours at all.
“You’re making this up as you go along,” he said, with Chellingworth replying, “No I’m not”.
Edwardson said Wright was simply helping her son get his paperwork up to date as he had a responsibility to do so because he was flying under Wright’s air operators’ certificate.
The jury has heard that Robinson’s flight records were out of date.
Edwardson asked Chellingworth if her family colluded to try to “deflect the blame across to Wright” to avoid Robinson being blamed for the crash.
“I do not agree at all,” she said.
Chellingworth admitted her son had asked her to source marijuana and she had sometimes forged his signature when helping him run his helicopter company.
Earlier on Tuesday, Robinson’s brother Zaccarie Chellingworth was also grilled over the bedside conversation between Wright and the injured pilot at the hospital.
Wright had said he needed to take 15-20 hours off the crashed helicopter and put them on Robinson’s own chopper “because there were hours unaccounted for”, Chellingworth said.
Under questioning from Edwardson, Chellingworth, a licensed aircraft engineer, said he was aware aviation crash investigators suspected the crashed chopper had run out of fuel.
Edwardson put it to Chellingworth he knew his brother would be in trouble if fuel exhaustion was found to be the cause of the crash.
Chellingworth rejected that and Edwardson’s accusation that his family had “manufactured allegations” against Wright to protect Robinson from blame for the crash.
When asked about Robinson’s cocaine use, Chellingworth said his brother was not an addict or a dealer and he had seen him take the drug only once, at a buck’s party on Wright’s boat.
The trial continues on Wednesday.
-AAP
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