Croc Wrangler: The cause of the crash, and the trials before Matt Wright's

I'm Sarah Konoski, and I've got a special episode of Conversations to share.

Kathleen Folbeck telling her own story.

For two decades, Kathleen was locked up in prison, wrongly convicted of the deaths of her four children, until friendship and science set her free.

I'm in prison accused of murdering my children.

I didn't physically do it, but carried something that did.

Hear my interview with Kathleen Folbeck right now on the ABC Listen app: ABC Listen: Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.

The disgraced cop, the dumped mobile phone, and the woman suing Matt Wright.

I'm ABC court reporter Olivana Lothoris.

And I'm Stephen Stockwell.

Welcome to the case of the Crock Rainbow.

He's one of the territory's biggest stars.

Flashing cameras and waiting reporters.

As Netflix star Matt Wright fronted quarters.

The Territory tourism operator is facing three counts of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

This was a tragic event that took the life of the crocodile egg collector.

Mr.

Wright strenuously denies any wrongdoing.

While we've taken you inside the trial of Matt Wright, this was just one part of the fallout from the fatal helicopter crash during a crock egg collection mission in 2022.

In this episode, we're going to take you through the other investigations, including a civil suit from the widow of the crock egg collector who died and the cases of two others who were at that crash site that day.

That's right, Stocky.

And the other two people are Michael Burbage.

He was one of the other pilots who was involved in that egg collecting mission on the 28th of February 2022.

And the other person is Neil Mellon, a former senior police officer who was off duty on that day, but who traveled out to the scene of the accident alongside Matt Wright.

Yeah, just a kind of wild cast of people involved in this event.

We're joined for this episode again by Matt Garrick, a senior reporter in the ABC's Northern Territory newsroom.

I mean, Matt, how significant were these proceedings in Darwin?

When it all started getting underway?

Yeah, hey, Stocky.

Hey, Ollie, how you going?

Look, you've got to remember at the time, Stocky, it was really this case that was gripping Darwin.

Everybody wanted to know what had happened and what was going on.

And this, really, these two cases were the first window that we'd had inside this

story and this saga, which was yet to unfold.

We started to get a bit of an idea of who was who, all the characters that would later come back in such a big way during the Supreme Court trial.

of Matt Wright and

start to make sense of how they kind of fit in in this bigger picture.

The cases also set up some of the key elements about what happened, the fatal crash, the men who were at this crash scene and their actions, and some of the evidence about who said what and when.

Yeah, if you want an idea of kind of what unfolded at the crash site that afternoon and that morning in February 2022, jump into our episode from earlier in the Crock Wrangler season.

Witnesses described the Tropper crash and you'll get a feeling for how this unfolded, who was there, and what they did.

And during the trial, we couldn't go too deep into the detail around all of this because we can only report what the jury was heard.

Now, the trial's over, we can talk a lot more freely about what was actually going on.

And yeah, there's kind of two main characters in this: Ollie, there is Mick Burbage, as you've mentioned, and Neil Mellon as well.

What were they charged with following the crash?

So, Stocky, both of these men were facing destruction of evidence charges.

And they really went to the destruction of the mobile phone, which belonged to Chris Wilson.

That was the egg collector who tragically died as a result of that accident.

Neil Mellon was also facing a number of other charges, but they were unrelated to that accident.

But the destruction of evidence charges really went to what happened at the scene of the crash and what happened to Mr.

Wilson's mobile phone afterward.

Yeah, and I think probably the easiest way to get through this is to kind of split them apart, right?

So, let's start with Mick Burbage.

He was another helicopter pilot on the day of this crash.

So, you know, this helicopter crashes, it's got Sebastian Robinson flying it.

Uh, Chris Wilson is underneath and is kind of like detached from the rope.

He dies when he hits the ground.

Um, and Michael Burbage is around, he gets right, he goes out to the crash site.

Um, and his charge relates to him throwing Chris Wilson's phone into the ocean while flying back to Darwin.

How did all of this shake out?

Yeah, so Michael Burbage, who we later learned during the trial of Matt Wright, was actually the first person to get to the scene of this accident.

He was out flying that day with Sebastian Robinson and Chris Wilson.

He was the person that sort of first noticed that this chopper that they were in hadn't been heard from in a while, and he's the one that went looking for them on that day.

Michael Burbage was charged in late 2022.

So we remember the accident was in February.

So this is just a couple of months later that we hear about this destruction of evidence charge.

And he ended up pleading guilty to that charge of destruction of evidence in December of 2023.

So almost a year later.

Yeah, right.

And I mean, you know, we've just been through a trial, the trial of Matt Wright, where he's pled not guilty through all that.

So we've seen kind of all this evidence presented, the jury there, people making these decisions.

I mean, I'm assuming that when you have a guilty plea, things move a fair bit quicker.

You know, it's kind of like, all right, cool, well, you're agreeing, you're doing this.

Now we just have to figure out what to do.

Have I got that right?

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, there's agreed facts that are agreed on by both the defense and the prosecution.

And essentially, there's no argument

about that.

It's just the person accepts that they did the wrong thing.

And definitely the process goes far quicker than having to go through what we've just seen with a trial where there's lots of contested details about what happened.

So as Matt said, because this was really our first insight into what happened on that day in February of 2022,

the media and the public got access to information much, much quicker and at a much earlier stage than potentially what we were anticipating.

So that's why it was sort of this much more immediate insight into what happened at the scene of that crash.

And yeah, he was found guilty of throwing away Chris Wilson's mobile phone.

I think the word he used during the trial of Matt Wright was he piffed it out of the helicopter, basically threw it into the ocean while returning to Darwin from the crash site.

And there was this strange interaction that we heard about as well, where he basically said something along the lines of,

you know, Danny doesn't need to see what's on that phone.

Danny referring to Chris Wilson's wife.

I mean, what did he mean by that?

Well, Stocky, these charges about destruction of evidence, as I said, were really the first we were learning about the scene of the accident.

So everything

in these two cases of Michael Burbage and Neil Mellon were really zeroed in on what happened to that.

mobile phone, which was really supposed to be potentially a critical piece of evidence for investigators who would have later gone out to the crash scene and tried to investigate what happened in this case.

And so what we heard through the story of Michael Burbage was that when the men arrived at the scene of the accident, Neil Mellon, who was that off-duty police officer, had removed the mobile phone from Chris Wilson and had passed it to Michael Burbage.

And it was at that moment when, as you said, Michael Burbage said something along the lines of, Danny doesn't need to know what was on that phone.

And we kind of got two varying sort of accounts of what that meant or why he destroyed the phone later on.

And from the prosecutor, he sort of said that Burbage knew the phone could have held the answers to why his best friend was deceased.

The defense said that Burbage was just trying to protect the reputation of his friend and also of Danielle Wilson.

But ultimately, the outcome was that no data was able to be retrieved from that mobile phone.

So it really just is this mystery.

As the judge said, there's really no evidence one way or another, and we'll just simply never know.

Yeah, I mean, you think of all the time we spent during the trial of Matt Wright listening to, you know, conversations about fuel, if the helicopter was fueled up, all that sort of thing.

You know, we saw photos posted to Facebook, and you, you know, kind of wonder if there was anything on that phone that could have been, you know, relevant to this trial.

Also, you know, Danielle Wilson, the widow of Chris Wilson, was in court through the trial of Matt Wright.

So she's had to sit there and listen to a bunch of this stuff as well.

She would have heard all this too, which

while you're mourning your husband, can't have been a pleasant thing to have had to kind of

think of and reckon with, regardless of kind of what the basis of it is.

We had Michael Burbage pleading guilty to this case.

What penalty was handed down in the end?

So ultimately, Michael Burbage got a $15,000 fine for for the destruction of that phone.

You know, we heard that he threw it into the ocean, essentially, just threw it out of the helicopter on his way back to Darwin.

So he was fined $15,000, and the prosecution did actually try to appeal that penalty.

They said that it was manifestly inadequate given the seriousness of the charge.

But ultimately, the Supreme Court dismissed that appeal.

And so a $15,000 fine is where it ended.

If I can just add, regarding what was said, the Danny doesn't need to see this, in the Supreme Court trial, when Neil Mellon was on the stand, he tried to frame it in a slightly different way.

I think he said something along the lines of, oh, it was said in a rather jokey manner, like, ha ha, Danny doesn't need to see this.

The prosecutor, Jason Galachi, SC, quickly dismissed that and said, I didn't ask you how it was framed.

But it's obvious that in retrospect, they're really trying to frame this narrative around what happened there.

Yeah, interesting.

Like all this little context, you know, them probably seeing the impact that, you know, what they've said is having on someone and, you know, potentially trying to change the way that it's perceived, I guess, in those situations.

Ollie, something I noticed when I was kind of doing the background research for this, I wasn't...

there for any of these pre-trial things or any of these other charges and cases.

But I noticed when I was reading about Michael Burbage's charge, all of this was happening at at about the same time that Matt Wright was heading through the courts as well.

What was the crossover here?

Well, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, we know that there were, you know, various different sort of strands to this story.

And, you know, as the media, we were sort of learning one by one all these different people who were slowly being charged with various things to do with what happened in and around this accident.

and Matt Wright was one of those people and there was a huge amount of attention on him because he was the public figure, the famous person at the center of this but of course he ended up fighting the charges and so it took much longer for any information to sort of leak out from that case

and so as Matt said because we had two other people who are now charged with something to do with what happened at the scene of that accident, there was really like a media frenzy around it because people were just desperate to get their hands on some sort of information or insight about what happened at the scene of this remote accident.

And yeah, there was plenty of interstate media who flew up for these two cases of Michael Burbage and Neil Mellon, really these two figures who up until this point were sort of these anonymous characters in this story, but who suddenly became the focus of all of this attention because of their connection to this story and also the mystery about this mobile phone.

I can remember on the day of the sentencing of Michael Burbage, Matt Wright suddenly showed up at court and was sitting there as

his friend and colleague was getting the sentence handed down.

And the media was all taken completely by surprise.

But of course, here's this well-known central character suddenly appearing by surprise, you know, and the media was, of course, ready for it.

Yeah, I mean, the Caster people who we've seen through the trial of Matt Wright, who attended the crash site on the day in 2022, was really surprising.

You know, we had, you know, one of the Northern Territory's richest men, Mick Burns, crocodile farmer,

who, you know, kind of commissioned, was the guy who'd asked these guys to go out and collect crocodile eggs on this day.

And then also attending the crash site as well, we have an off-duty policeman, Neil Mellon.

He was, you know, a reasonably high-ranking police officer at this time.

He wasn't working on that day, but he's gotten wind of the crash.

He's gone out to see Matt Wright, see how things are.

And then he ends up in the helicopter and at the site as this is going on, kind of seeing himself as this sort of coordinator of the search and rescue operation.

And following that, you know, he paints himself, you know, when we heard his evidence during the trial of Matt Wright, painting himself as, you know, yeah, this coordinator, this person helping make sure everything's working well and being done in the right way.

But following that, Ollie, he's charged with like a bit of a laundry list of offences.

Can you take me through what he was faced with?

Yeah, absolutely.

So he was again also charged with destruction of evidence.

That was to do with the mobile phone.

And then there was a bunch of other charges which we later learnt

were entirely unrelated to the accident.

So there was obtaining benefit by deception and then there were six counts of disclosing confidential information.

And it really wasn't until the sentencing of Neil Mellon that we learnt what those other charges were in relation to.

We learnt that he had been leaking sensitive information

related to various investigations.

There was mention of people involved in domestic violence matters, that he'd been leaking that information to friends and colleagues.

And he obviously had access to this information because of his high ranking in the Northern Territory Police Force.

And certainly the courts viewed that as an extremely serious offence.

Yeah, I mean, that is incredibly serious stuff that he's doing there.

And I think there was a moment during the trial where he was talking about how he heard about the crash.

I think he was talking to his wife, who was also a police officer.

And it just sounded like he was talking so casually about obtaining this information.

And I did wonder, you know, if he understood.

like the kind of the processes that he should have been following or were supposed to be followed through something like that.

And so, yeah, kind of wild to hear the other charges that he was faced with through all of that.

I mean, as well as McBurbich, he pled guilty to the charges he was facing.

What did his hearing look like?

How did all of that shake out?

So, again, because he pleaded guilty to this charge, there wasn't a great deal of argument about what happened.

The facts were just accepted.

But, of course, there was argument from the prosecution and the defence about what penalty he should face and the serious level of seriousness about these charges.

In relation to the mobile phone, Mellon's defense lawyer argued that he believed that there was something on this mobile phone belonging to Chris Wilson that might have been upsetting or damaging to Mr.

Wilson's widow.

And that was why he'd given it the phone to Burbich, who later threw it away.

So again, trying to frame this as these two men sort of protecting their friend and protecting the widow as opposed to trying to do something nefarious.

And also the defense argued that Mellon did try to sort of relocate the phone a number of months later only to find that Michael Burbage had thrown it into the ocean.

But of course the prosecution on the other hand argued that you know because of Mellon's seniority in the police force and his experience with search and rescue missions and dealing with crime scenes that he really ought to have known better and he ought to have known that something like a mobile phone of a person who has died and who is at the scene of a crime would very likely be a critical piece of evidence that police would be looking to get their hands on.

And so the idea that you just pass it to a friend and forget about it and don't worry about what happens to it, they said, well, that's really not good enough.

And in the end, the judge in the Darwin local court said that the actions of Neil Mellon weren't the actions of someone acting in a moment of distress at the death of his friend, but they were actions of someone being less than honest, were the words that the judge used.

And we saw Michael Burbage with a $15,000 fine for pleading guilty, penalty for Neil Mellon, a fair bit harsher than that, given what he'd been doing or convicted of.

Certainly.

He ended up being sentenced to eight months in prison, suspended after three months.

But this was a real shock.

I remember when that sentence was handed down in the courtroom, because we'd had the fine for Michael Burbage,

to see this much heavier penalty for Neil Mellon.

I remember the reaction in the courtroom.

It was quite shocking.

I think it's important to remember that Neil Mellon was facing a string of other unrelated charges.

And the judge did make a point about how seriously she viewed those other charges.

charges and that heavy penalty was really imposed because Neil Mellon was a cop.

You know, he had a position of power that essentially the court found he had abused by leaking this sensitive information to people.

So the courts really did look at his conduct as being much more serious because of his position.

And of course, it wasn't just that single charge.

He was facing quite a number of other charges alongside that destruction of evidence.

Yeah,

talking about, you know, kind of the position he was in, Matt Garrick, you know, it seems pretty clear that he was held held to a higher standard because he was a police officer in this case, right?

Absolutely, Stocky.

And as you said earlier, you know, that there was some argument that he didn't completely know what he was doing.

Well, the prosecutor at the time said he knew this was a blatant breach of his rules of conduct as a police officer, as a very senior police officer.

And the judge in sentencing said, you know, he'd abused his rank and position and let the power of being a senior police officer go to his head.

Neil Mellon's no longer in the police force, and the Supreme Court heard in his evidence during the Matt Wright trial that he's now in the industry of leak detection.

Not sure if there's an element of irony in that.

Yeah, I don't know if you've ever seen the show White House Plumbers, but they don't do a lot of plumbing.

And when I did hear Neil Mellon say that, my...

My mind went straight there.

I in fact turned to the head of Audio Studios, Eric George, who who you hear mentioned at the end of this podcast sometime, and said to him, I think this guy might have a job like in the White House Plumbers.

So if you're not familiar with that, maybe just briefly check out that show and you'll get a feeling for potentially the sort of work that Neil Mellon is

doing

in this space.

He was a very decorated police officer too.

Like this was someone who had received awards for his time in the police force.

He was

in a very high ranking within the NT police force.

So quite the fall from grace.

Also during his court proceedings, and I think I mentioned this in a past episode, he was supported by some very high-profile figures.

Joining him in the courtroom on some of his hearings was a former Northern Territory senator, a former front bench minister of the Tony Abbott federal government, Nigel Scullion.

Nigel Scullion was there by his side on many of those hearings.

So obviously there was a feeling that, you know, we'll support our mate through this,

who has been a long-serving and decorated police officer.

Matt Garrick, Justice Blow, who's presided over the trial of Matt Wright, was also supposed to be looking into the Northern Territory Police.

I mean, any relation to the Neil Mellon charges and that job that he's been brought on to?

Yeah, it's a good question, Stocky, but short answer is no.

Essentially, the inquiry that Justice Blow was brought on for related to the former Police Commissioner Michael Murphy and senior appointments that were made under his tenure.

I think there was no crossover between Mellon leaving the force and Michael Murphy becoming commissioner and making those appointments.

So there probably wouldn't have been any crossover for Justice Blow between the Matt Wright trial and the inquiry.

Great.

No, great context.

Thank you, Matt Aric.

That's what we've got you here for.

So

easily able to pull questions without notice out of your deep knowledge of Northern Territory governance governance and procedures.

Ollie, as well as these two cases that we've heard, so Neil Mellon and Mick Burbage,

the widow of Chris Wilson, Danielle Wilson, has also taken action against Hellybrook.

This is the company that Matt Wright runs.

She's basically, have I got this right, trying to sue Matt Wright for the death of her husband?

Exactly, Stocky.

Yeah, she is taking Matt Wright as the director of Hellybrook to court, suing for damages for the death of her husband and the father of her two young children.

She's also suing CASA, the civil aviation safety authority,

you know, essentially arguing that her husband should never have even been in the air because CASA should never have approved the activities that they were conducting on that day, that human slinging

that they were conducting doing that egg collecting back in February of 2022.

And there's already been quite a bit of drama involved in this proceeding.

CASA applied to be dropped from the proceedings, basically saying,

you know, we did our best and, you know, it's not, we shouldn't be held responsible for this accident.

It should really be the responsibility of Hellybrook.

But they failed in that bid to be dropped.

And so, yeah, Danielle Wilson's still very much pursuing Matt Wright and CASA for this accident.

How's that going at the moment?

I mean, I, you know, kind of broadly across criminal proceedings, how long they take, how that work, civil proceedings, whole other bag.

I mean, where's this up to?

So this is in the federal court of Australia.

And as I said, there have already been a number of interlocutory proceedings, you know, various infighting.

Matt Wright himself has filed a cross-claim seeking indemnity from his insurer.

So it really is a little bit of a mess.

And like all court cases, criminal and civil, they can take a really long time.

So we're expecting that case to be back in court a little later this year in October, but unlikely that we're going to be seeing any result from it anytime soon.

And I mean, the thing I think about a lot with this case, I mean, with the accident more than the trial or any of the proceedings around it, is that, you know, Chris Wilson was Matt Wright's best mate in this situation.

You know, Matt Wright, the star of these TV shows, Chris Wilson on those shows with him.

They'd worked together for years and years.

I can only imagine that Danielle Wilson would have been close to Matt Wright.

I'm sure they would be hanging out with Matt Wright's wife and family, Ky Wright, the kids as well.

So there's this whole relationship that would be there as well.

Matt Garrick, what is that relationship like now?

Well, Stocky, as you say, they were very close.

You can tell it just by looking, as you say, at those old episodes of Wild Croc Territory.

There's this real rapport between those two men and their families, of course, were close too.

While I was preparing coverage for the trial or during the trial I was looking back at some of the

coverage from Mr.

Wilson's funeral and it was heartbreaking.

You could see those families really coming together at that point.

They were obviously still very close.

Now the pair don't interact.

During the trial Matt Wright's supporters sat on one side of the courtroom and as far as I could see in any breaks they didn't speak to Danny or Wilson at all and she and Matt really had no visible interaction during that period.

And if there was any clearer indication of the current relationship between those two parties, outside court on the day of Matt Wright's guilty verdict, she gave a powerful emotional statement of where she spoke of Wright's conduct.

She said his actions in meddling with the investigation had denied an unimpeded probe into the crash that killed killed her husband and in turn denied her two sons answers about what happened to their father.

So, you know, if there's any better example of a relationship breakdown, it was in that statement outside of court.

I mean, you say, you know, you talk about how close they were at the funeral and then kind of the divide that's occurred now.

Do we have any insight into when that split started to happen?

You know, as Matt said, looking back at that vision of the funeral proceedings, I mean, Matt Wright was a pallbearer.

He was clearly still very much within that inner circle and still very close with Danielle Wilson.

And that was quite soon after the accident.

And of course, then, you know, we had these charges dropping, you know, months down the track.

So clearly somewhere in between the immediate aftermath of that accident and then in the months later, as the investigation went on, that relationship clearly broke down.

Yeah,

such a sad situation that we've found ourselves reporting on this at all, right?

You know, we've got a man who's died because of this accident.

We've got another man, Sebastian Robinson, whose life has been changed forever because of this.

So it's incredibly sad to even have to kind of get into this and talk through this at all.

You know, explaining the proceedings and give you an insight into that process is kind of what we're here for.

But yeah, being here to start with is still, you know, pretty sad.

You know, one of the things that we got a lot of questions about during the trial of Matt Wright, Ollie, was what investigations have been done into the crash themselves.

So something that was really interesting with this trial was that, you know, it was something that stemmed from a helicopter crash

in early 2022,

but actually wasn't related to that.

You know, there was no suggestion that Matt Wright was involved in the crash on that day, that his actions had anything to do with the helicopter going down.

But there had been investigations by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, also Civil Aviation Safety Authority looking into this stuff as well.

Lots of questions being asked of lots of people.

Something that I will apologise for now is that during the trial, we can't answer a lot of the questions about it.

I remember we were talking about the crash and talking about how we didn't know what had happened, and we got loads of emails from people being like, actually,

there's an investigation that was done.

You should look at this.

You need to talk about this.

And we couldn't at the time because it hadn't been put in front of the jury.

But yeah, the ATSB investigation into the crash came down in November 2023.

We heard during the trial that it found fuel exhaustion was a reason for that crash.

That came out towards the end of the trial, so we started to mention it at that point.

What else was part of that investigation, Ollie?

Yeah, this was really significant when this report came down because again,

we still hadn't heard much in the way of any detail about what happened on the day of the accident, before or after the accident.

We certainly didn't have anything to the extent of the knowledge that we have post-trial.

And this report really went into, as you said, the fuel.

But it also went into the reason or how Chris Wilson actually died.

And of course, you know, we heard there had been an accident, but then it was revealed that the pilot Sebastian Robinson had released Mr.

Wilson from above a likely survivable height.

So of course the egg collector Chris Wilson was hanging on that line and then was released from quite a significant height, something around the 25 metre mark, which is what we know now after the trial.

So that was one of the elements that this report revealed.

The other thing was the report did say that Hellybrook had likely overrun the helicopter's maintenance inspection and overhaul periods which might have increased the likelihood of the helicopter experiencing a technical failure or malfunction.

But again, they didn't go as far as to say that that was the reason for the crash.

There wasn't enough evidence to conclude that any of that was the result of the accident.

But it did go into these practices, which we heard so much about later on during the trial.

Cocaine was the other thing that was brought up in this report.

So the ATSB found that the pilot's exposure to cocaine within the previous few days again, increased the likelihood of fatigue or depression or inattention.

However, again, they said there was insufficient evidence to determine whether those had any bearing on the accident itself.

The other sort of interesting thing that the report mentioned was this real

criticism of CASA, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, basically saying that CASA didn't have its processes or safety processes up to scratch for approving or mitigating the risks of activities like human slinging or egg collecting.

So it was interesting to see that tension between these two safety authorities, the ATSB saying to CASA, your processes and your approval processes weren't up to scratch.

Yeah, I guess that's potentially part of the reason that Danielle Wilson's included them in that suit that she's brought as well.

So yeah, really interesting insight.

And I mean, just to kind of come back on this and full circle it,

ATSB finding that fuel exhaustion was the reason for this crash.

and was that there wasn't enough fuel in the tank or that there wasn't enough fuel getting to the engine to keep it in the air?

Well, what the ATSB said in their report was that the helicopter was likely not refuelled at the en route fuel depot, which was about three-quarters of the way between the departure on the outskirts of Darwin and where they were going near the King River.

And the report said that the pilot did not identify the reducing fuel state before the helicopter's engine stopped in flight.

So that was what the ATSB found in their report.

Great.

Thank you for clarifying, Ollie.

I appreciate that.

You've heard a lot about helicopters through this trial.

A lot about fuel as well.

I mean, the different colours of fuel was something that popped up early in the trial.

And yeah, seeing that coming back towards the end of the trial was really interesting.

If you want to catch up on any of the episodes we've made about the trial of Matt Wright, jump into the feed of the case of.

You can find them all there.

They've got got the handy crock wrangler prefix on them, so they're easy to spot.

And work your way from oldest to youngest, and you'll be up to speed on how that trial unfolded.

Speaking of the helicopter industry, we've had so many questions about the helicopter industry.

And Matt Garrick, you're preparing a bit of a deep dive for ABC News.

Yeah, that's right, Stocky.

In the wake of the trial, where we heard all these

agreed facts read out about widespread flouting of safety laws in the civil aviation industry by chopper pilots in the Northern Territory.

We decided to go a bit deeper and we've talked to people in the industry, aviation experts, people who can kind of share a little bit about how widespread this really is and what it really means, what the ramifications of this actually are.

And that'll be publishing this Saturday, Stocky.

You can look online on ABC News, the digital platform, and also it'll be on the 7 p.m.

news.

Yeah, that'll be on ABC News everywhere around the country on Saturday night.

And I know you're taking your social cues from the KSOB.

So cancel your plans, stay in.

Check out Matt Garrick's story on ABC News Saturday night.

And then, you know, while you're clearing your calendar, next Tuesday, we'll be diving into the questions we couldn't answer.

You know, we have so many wonderful questions sent to the KSOB at abc.net.au.

And, you know, a lot of them we can't get to you know there was the one that we mentioned on our episode on Tuesday about a transcription expert who should be called or asked about things and a person had been called but the jury wasn't in the room so we couldn't talk about it and we've had so many people getting in touch about the helicopter industry not just in the Northern Territory but all over Australia so some wonderful questions that we'll be talking through next week in our episode on Tuesday around all of that also getting into some of the details of the crocodile egg collecting industry as well talking through through some of the questions you've had around that.

And so if you have any more you'd like us to answer, you've got a couple of days to get them to us.

Email the caseob at abc.net.au and we'll dive into all of them on Tuesday next week.

And on Monday, we'll have an update episode from the sentencing of Erin Patterson.

I'll be joined by Christian Silver and Rachel Brown.

We'll bring you all the detail from that sentence.

So make sure you're hanging around the ABC Listen app on Monday afternoon next week because that'll be dropping into your feed in the ABC The Snap slightly before it rocks up on your other podcast platforms.

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The case of the Crock Wrangler is produced by ABC Audio Studios and ABC News.

It's presented by me, Olivana Lothoris, Matt Garrick and Stephen Stockwell.

Our executive producer is Claire Rawlinson and a big thank you to senior lawyer Jasmine Sims, our legal queen, for her legal advice for every episode.

Also to the Northern Territory newsroom and audio studios manager Eric George.

This episode was produced on the land of the Larrakia and Warrantree people.

Have you ever seen a news story and thought, huh, what's the science behind that?

I remember thinking, gee, Lancet,

how did you publish this?

You know, it's not great.

Well, chances are, I have two.

Obviously, everybody poops, and depending on what depth it gets to, it could be sequestered away from the atmosphere for decades to millennia.

Hi, I'm Belinda Smith, the host of Lab Notes, where every week we bring you the science behind new discoveries and current events.

Find it by searching for Lab Notes on the ABC Listener.