On January 2, 2023 two sightseeing helicopters collided over the Broadwater near Sea World on the Gold Coast. One helicopter broke apart and crashed on a sandbar, killing four people and seriously injuring others. The second helicopter managed to land on the sandbar with injuries to the pilot and passengers. Authorities and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau have opened investigations, and the immediate facts are now well reported. What is less obvious in the coverage so far is how basic VFR traffic management practices failed to provide robust, practical separation for short sightseeing flights operating in close proximity to each other and to the public.

I fly for a living and I consult on airspace integration. From an operational standpoint there are three structural risk factors this accident exposes.

1) Opposing critical phase operations so close to each other

Sightseeing flights operate on short circuits with frequent takeoffs and landings. That pattern increases the number of times aircraft are in critical phases of flight. When two helipads operate in the same small geographic area and both are used for high cadence joy flights, you create multiple conflict points where an arriving aircraft and a departing aircraft can converge. In this accident news reports made clear one helicopter was landing while the other was taking off. That is the classic setup for a see and avoid failure when there is no stronger procedural separation in place. (See reporting from ABC News and The Guardian.)

2) Reliance on visual detection at low altitude in a busy, distracting environment

Takeoff and landing around a crowded beach with boats and people below imposes competing visual demands on pilots. Visual acquisition of another helicopter can be obscured by background clutter, sun angle, cockpit structure, or passenger positions. Short sightseeing flights put the pilot under a steady rhythm of task switching between approach profile control, situational scanning, passenger management, and monitoring of ground activity. These are precisely the conditions under which see and avoid is least reliable. Early media coverage emphasised the crowded public environment and the suddenness of the event, which supports the concern that visual scanning alone is an inadequate primary separation method in that setting.

3) Operational tempo and lack of a simple, enforceable sequencing mechanism

Many small operators rely on informal procedures: radio calls, hand signals by ground crew, or an ad hoc understanding among crews. Those mechanisms work until there is a missed call, a misinterpreted signal, or a distraction. The consequences of a single missed cue are stark when aircraft are separated by seconds. In an environment of frequent five minute or shorter circuits, the margin for human error is small.

What operators and regulators should be thinking about now

There are steps that can reduce this class of risk immediately and others that should be considered medium term. They are practical and operator centric.

Immediate, low cost mitigations operators should adopt now

  • Implement a “pad boss” or ground coordinator role whenever multiple helicopters are operating from adjacent helipads. That person sequences departures and arrivals and has the authority to hold departures until the inbound is actually clear.
  • Standardise radio phraseology and enforce a sterile cockpit for approach and landing. Short, unambiguous calls reduce the chance of misunderstanding under high workload.
  • Limit simultaneous operations in and out of adjacent pads during peak periods. Fewer simultaneous movements reduces the number of potential conflict points.
  • Enforce a requirement that ground crew do not board departing passengers until a positive clearance is given that the approach path is clear. Ground activity should not be the cue that a pilot assumes provides separation.

Near term changes operators and local authorities should pursue

  • Review helipad geometry and published traffic patterns. If pads are close enough that arrival and departure tracks cross or overlap, adjust procedures so that tracks are physically deconflicted whenever possible.
  • Fit aircraft with cooperative surveillance equipment where practicable, such as ADS‑B out and in, and ensure pilots are trained to integrate that data into visual scanning rather than replacing it. Even basic traffic displays can provide critical last second cues in busy ops.
  • Implement a simple local standard operating procedure that defines minimum separation times between an outbound and an inbound helicopter when operating from nearby pads.

Regulatory and oversight considerations

  • Regulators should take a hard look at high cadence tourist operations in dense public spaces. The combination of frequent critical‑phase transitions, close proximity to public areas, and multiple pads merits specific operating guidance beyond general VFR rules.
  • Safety management systems for operators that conduct short scenic flights should include explicit hazard assessments for pad proximity and passenger loading practices. If routine changes to operations create new conflict points they must be risk assessed and mitigated before the change becomes normal practice.

Why these measures matter

See and avoid worked for decades in many environments, but it was never designed to be the last or only barrier where aircraft are operating seconds apart in crowded airspace and on the edge of public beaches. The Gold Coast collision is a blunt reminder that procedures that depend on a perfect chain of human actions are brittle. Adding simple physical or procedural barriers, a human coordinator with decision authority on the ground, and better cooperative surveillance for crews will not eliminate risk, but it will reduce the dependence on a single cue or a single pilot seeing the other aircraft.

The ATSB and police investigations will take time to extract technical causes and contributing factors. In the meantime operators running high throughput VFR sightseeing flights owe it to their passengers and to the public to treat helipad layout and sequencing as safety critical. The kinds of mitigations above are practical, often low cost, and directly address the failure modes this tragedy has exposed.

As investigators work through recorded footage and witness accounts I expect the discussion to move to specific system failures. Until that work is complete, the sensible path is conservative operations: fewer simultaneous movements, a competent ground coordinator, standardised calls and procedures, and a built in assumption that see and avoid is fallible under high tempo, cluttered visual environments. Those are the kinds of changes an operator can implement now, and they are the sorts of controls regulators should encourage while formal findings are pending.