Officials in the Australian city of Cairns have determined that the employee of a charter flight company who was licensed in New Zealand but not in Australia took a joyride in a helicopter and was killed when he crashed it into the roof of a nearby hotel “was affected by a significant amount of alcohol” and flew “well below the 1,000 ft allowed for flight over a built-up area,” but they haven’t been able to determine why he stole the chopper at 1:30 AM on August 12th, 9News reports.
“For reasons unknown, pilot actions resulted in a collision with a building while conducting an unauthorised and unnecessary flight, while affected by alcohol, late at night and at low heights over a built-up area, and without night flying endorsements,” the Australian Transport Safety Bureau wrote in their report on Nautilus Aviation employee Blake Wilson’s little mishap that destroyed the top three floors of the Hilton DoubleTree in Cairns in the inferno that resulted, though luckily no one else was injured. More unclear than the “motive” is why the ATSB, who exhaustively detailed Wilson’s movements with friends at a number of bars prior to the crash as he was celebrating a job promotion, couldn’t just write “sometimes drunk dudes do stupid shit and get themselves killed.”