As a film director, Alexander Whitrow is no stranger to drama — but even someone with his cinematic sense could not have anticipated the set of his debut movie becoming the scene of a devastating real-life plane crash.
Key points:
- The movie Roadkill tells the story of a thief who mugs a serial killer
- But filming proved just as dramatic when the director’s uncle crashed a light plane
- Audio of the incident was caught on camera — and the pilot lived to tell the tale
The then-19-year-old was in the middle of filming his indie thriller Roadkill at Renmark in South Australia’s Riverland region in 2019 when a light aircraft piloted by his uncle, Tim Whitrow, roared overhead.
Footage taken at the time captured the unscripted sequence of events that followed, in which Tim miraculously survived but broke 12 ribs and lost a foot.
As the actors prepare to reshoot a scene, the camera fades to black — before an engine roars overhead, the cast and crew break into expressions of shock, and a loud bang booms nearby.
“We basically saw the plane come up one side of the verandah and then tumbling down and smashing,” Alexander said.
“My first thought when I saw that was, ‘Tim’s dead, there’s no way you could survive that’.
“Seeing a plane crash is terrifying — the only thing more terrifying than that is knowing that your uncle is in it.”
The accident sent film crews into chaos, and onlookers rushed to the scene.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Okay, so this is what it’s like to die’,” Tim recalled.
“That was the last thought that went through my head.”
Tim’s flyover wasn’t part of the film — as a winemaker, he uses a light plane to get around, and he had flown up to the Riverland to help out on set.
The crash, which happened next to a local vineyard, was the result of an almost comical mishap.
“At about 300 feet, I went to retract the flaps and just next to the flaps there was a button called a ‘trim tab’ which got caught under threads of my jacket,” he said.
As he moved his hand, the plane started to nosedive “and by the time I’d recovered I looked out the window [and saw] power lines, high-tension power lines, and trees”.
“The high-tension powerlines electrocuted me, so I don’t remember the crash at all, which is fortunate,” he said.
But Alexander certainly remembers.
His grandmother, a registered nurse, made sure Tim was breathing while emergency services were on the way.
“We ran over to him unsure whether the plane was about to explode, it was really messy,” Alexander said.
“Dad saw his foot sticking out at the wrong angle with a bit of bone poking out. It was pretty gruesome.
“Some of us couldn’t drive back to Adelaide we were that shaken up by it.”
Drama prepares for screen debut
Tim survived the crash, but the force of the impact led to him “breaking 12 ribs, breaking my sternum and bruising my heart”.
He also punctured a lung and suffered such severe damage to one of his legs that his foot was amputated.
“Both my ankles were crushed and, on my right foot, I had severed all three arteries feeding my foot,” he said.
Production of the amateur film was naturally put on hold.
But, remarkably, within a few days the filming of Roadkill had resumed.
The movie tells the story of a thief who operates along the highways of rural Australia and gets caught in an ongoing police investigation after he mugs a serial killer.
“It’s almost an entirely South Australian casting crew,” Alexander said.
“[The] majority of the film was shot at various locations out at the Riverland.”
Almost three years on from the on-set drama within a drama, the movie is about to screen in cinemas across South Australia.
The now 22-year-old Alexander will join his uncle Tim to watch the premiere on Thursday night.
“Tim is a bit of a cat, he does have nine lives,” Alexander joked.
“He’s got to be down to three or four by now, but he is a survivor.”
