The Court sentenced a corporate PCBU to fines of $50,000 per offence (reduced from an appropriate fine of $400,000 per offence due to limited capacity to pay and totality) and an officer to fines of $75,000 per offence (reduced from $100,000 per offence on totality) for s 32 WHS Act offences arising from the deaths of a skydiving instructor and student caused by a snagging hazard on an unauthorised aircraft modification and failure to communicate mandatory buddy check requirements. The Court held that operating an aircraft modified without an engineering order and failing to implement systems to communicate safety-related regulatory changes to instructors constituted breaches of the PCBU's primary duty and the officer's due diligence duty, and that the deaths constituted the s 21A(2)(g) aggravating factor of harm greater than ordinarily expected for the offence. Post-conviction acceptance of findings was treated as remorse but afforded less weight than a guilty plea.
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