Essendon King Air Crash: Pilot Missteps Turn Bloke’s Golf Trip into Disaster

The Raw Bones of What Went Down

On 21 February 2017, a Beechcraft B200 King Air (VH‑ZCR)—chartered for a golf getaway—took off from Essendon Airport in Melbourne. Just seconds into the climb, the aircraft yawed violently to the left, clipped the roof of the nearby DFO shopping centre, crashed, and erupted in flames. Five dead—four American passengers and the Aussie pilot. Ground casualties? Two people suffered minor injuries.

Official verdict? No engine failure. The culprit? The issue was a combination of a rudder trim that was mis-set to full left, which was completely ignored during pre-flight checks, and a checklist that failed to flag the trim position. The result: loss of directional control and a climb trajectory that spiralled into tragedy.

The Anatomy of a Disaster—Dismantled

• Trim was set full-nose left before takeoff, and nobody caught it. This indicates a complete lack of redundancy in at least five critical situations.
  

• The final climb was sluggish and unbalanced—a prolonged ground roll, then yaw and sideslip took over. The aircraft reached only about 160 ft altitude before disaster.
  

• The pilot made seven “Mayday” calls, but it was already too late.
  

• The crash would’ve been even worse if not for the building being there—it was already on a path toward hitting a freeway. An unforeseen irony emerged.
  

• Contributing extras: the cockpit voice recorder had failed to record due to an impact switch that wasn’t reset after a hard landing weeks earlier. There were no recorded human factor clues.
  

• Oh, and the aircraft was 240 kg over take-off weight—but that wasn’t enough to tip the blame. Still, helpful to know.

The Ugly Lesson Never Pretended to Be Pretty

1. Rudder trim—the unsung safety screw—can kill if mis‑set. A solid checklist isn’t optional.
   

2. Checklists are your life insurance. If you neglect them, you are merely relying on luck. Hope isn’t a viable flight plan.
   

3. Safety nets fail when someone resets them to zero—CVR and flight checks fell through.
   

4. Weight limits aren’t decorative. Overloading doesn’t always kill—but it sure doesn’t help.
   

5. Pilot fatigue? Maybe. ATSB couldn’t confirm—but it’s best to err on the side of sober decision‑making.

   
   

Final Word (Because Humans Somehow Need to Screw This Up More Than Once)

Pilot error. Checklists ignored. Hazardous infrastructure. Fatal outcome.

The culprit wasn’t space exploration—it was procedural breakdown. A bloke’s golf trip went straight into the wreckage of complacency.

If we still can’t learn that human error only kills when safety systems go silent, we’re screwed. Or worse, someone else might suffer the consequences of a golf trip gone wrong.