‘I thought you were in the army’: billionaire pilot’s outback rescue stuns stranded father and son

“I thought you were in the army or something.” That was Bill Kosky’s reaction when a Perth billionaire climbed out of a private helicopter to rescue him and his son from South Australia’s flooded outback.

Kosky and his son, from Middle Park in Melbourne, had been on what was meant to be a dream trip to see Lake Eyre fill with water. Instead, a sudden storm on Halligan Bay Road turned the unsealed track into deep mud, leaving their Toyota stuck and the pair stranded with almost no phone signal.

They spent a night alone in the flooded desert after sending brief emergency messages before their signal cut out completely, with no certainty about when — or whether — help would find them.

The rescue happened only because Tim Roberts, an experienced pilot who built his fortune after his family’s construction company Multiplex was sold to Brookfield in 2007, had stopped at the William Creek Hotel on the Oodnadatta Track for the night. There, he heard that emergency services were searching for two missing travellers.

Roberts abandoned his own overnight plans, joined local resident Trevor Wright, and flew across the flooded terrain looking for the missing vehicle. The huge expanse of mud and water made the Toyota difficult to spot from above, but the two eventually located it and landed close by, ending the father and son’s ordeal.

Wright said the region has seen 28 people rescued over six weeks, as heavy rain floods already-difficult roads leading to Lake Eyre and catches out visitors unfamiliar with the terrain and its limited communication coverage.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]