Fiona Phillips was sitting in a Qantas executive meeting about aviation safety in Sydney, completely unaware her husband, Peter Phillips, had just been killed in a mid-air crash at Mangalore, hundreds of kilometres away in central Victoria.
It wasn’t until after 4.30pm that she found out, even later than her staff in Melbourne, because of police processes and bureaucracy.
Then she had to grapple with how to tell their children, aged six and 11, that their beloved dad had died.
He was the one who stayed home with them after quitting his job to raise them.
It was 9pm by the time Ms Phillips reached them.
“That moment lives in our lives and feels like it was yesterday,” Ms Phillips told a coronial inquest into the Mangalore crash on Thursday, March 28, the last of four days of hearings.
“I have no confidence that this event could not occur again.”
Brianna Sutcliffe said goodbye that morning to her fiancé Ido Segev, the love of her life and the only person who could “soothe” her soul.
Six months earlier, they had decided the time wasn’t right to have a baby.
There would be no 2020 wedding, only what Ms Sutcliffe described as intolerable pain with interludes of long periods of sleep to escape the grief, compounded by her need to keep advocating for the value of his life.
“Every second of every day I am forced to reconcile his absence,” Ms Sutcliffe told the Coroners Court of Victoria.
“The only person I crave to see, hug, talk to, I will never see again.”
Mr Segev’s mother’s health rapidly deteriorated after her son’s death and she died on January 18, 2024, his brother Yonaton Segev said.
Their father barely spoke to people any more, instead visiting his son’s plot day and night to talk to his “baby boy”.
Yonaton himself was also overcome with stress and had a pacemaker implanted at 43.
Martin Gobel, the youngest son of Chris Gobel, who also died in the collision, lamented how authorities drew out the legal process following his father’s death, resorting to denials rather than accountability, reform and paying their dues.
His mother and father lost a son in another aircraft accident 15 years before the Mangalore crash.
The couple ran a flight school and charter company for many years and won recognition for high safety standards.
Chris was teaching Pasinee Meeseang in the plane VH-JQF, which took off from Mangalore as another aircraft was approaching the uncontrolled airspace on February 19.
The court has been told air traffic controller John Tucker did not issue a safety warning before the collision to the other aircraft, VH-AEM, carrying Mr Phillips and Mr Segev.
“My life looks nothing like it did (before),” Mr Gobel’s son said on Thursday.
Emergency services managed to retrieve Mr Phillips’ watch from the wreck and give it to his wife, who plugged it in to see his heart rate data when he died.
She braced for it to show a spike before the planes collided mid-air but instead, it showed the most Mr Phillips exerted himself was walking to the plane, she told the court.
The data suggested her husband had no idea of the incoming aircraft, Ms Phillips said.
“(Mr Tucker only needed to say) ‘AEM, confirm you have JQF sighted’,” she told the court.
State Coroner John Cain will deliver his findings in the inquest at a later date.
— with AAP
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