(NOV 25) Fatal Mid-Air Collision During Formation Approach Near Wedderburn

Box to Echelon

Four aircraft, four solo pilots, flying as one — that's the discipline of formation flying, and on the morning of 30 November 2025, a group calling itself Acro Formation had been practicing it well. Four Van's-brand kit-built light aircraft, flown by experienced amateur builders and aerobatic pilots, were inbound to Wedderburn airfield southwest of Sydney just after noon, wrapping up a flight together.

As they approached, the lead pilot called for a formation change: move from a box formation into echelon, each aircraft sliding slightly behind and to the right of the one ahead. It's a standard maneuver, done specifically to set the group up for landing in succession — enter the circuit vian "initial and pitch" approach, peel off one at a time, land in order. Precise, practiced, ordinary.

The Moment the Formation Broke

Somewhere in that transition, two of the four aircraft made contact. VH-EWS and VH-NMG — both Van's RV-7s, similar enough to be flying wingtip to wingtip in formation — collided in the air near the airfield.

VH-NMG, though damaged, stayed flyable. Its pilot, uninjured, brought it around and landed safely at Wedderburn, taxiing off the runway under his own control. VH-EWS did not have that option. The aircraft, badly damaged by the collision, descended into forested terrain near the airfield, narrowly missing the hangars on its way down. Its pilot — 54-year-old Eddie Seve, a seasoned aerobatic flyer who had built the aircraft himself — was fatally injured. Emergency services located the wreckage and recovered his body from the bushland shortly after.

What the ATSB Found — and Didn't

Australia's Transport Safety Bureau deployed investigators to the site within hours. Their preliminary report, released roughly two months later, reconstructed the sequence up to the moment of collision — the formation change, the echelon maneuver, the positioning of each aircraft — but the collision itself resisted easy explanation. A full flight-control continuity check on the wreckage of aircraft #3, VH-EWS, wasn't possible; the disruption from the impact and subsequent crash had damaged too much of the airframe to trace every control input back cleanly. What examination could be done on the recoverable components didn't turn up any pre-collision defect — nothing wrong with the aircraft before the two RV-7s came together.

One detail from the investigation stands out for what it represents rather than what it proves: neither pilot involved in the collision was running an onboard video camera during the accident flight, even though both had frequently flown with one in the past. Neither did the other two pilots in the formation. It's the kind of detail that doesn't explain a cause, but does explain a gap — in an event that came down to relative positioning between two aircraft in the final seconds before impact, there's no recorded angle from inside either cockpit to show exactly how the closure happened.

The Discipline Formation Flying Demands

Formation flying is built on trust and precision in equal measure — each pilot holding position relative to the others, maintaining separation that's often measured in feet rather than the much larger margins used in ordinary traffic patterns. An "initial and pitch" recovery to landing, the maneuver Acro Formation was executing, compresses that precision even further, timing four aircraft's transition from tight formation into a landing sequence in the same airspace, at the same time, close to the ground.

Why Formation Flying Carries Its Own Risk

Formation flying isn't inherently more dangerous than solo flying in open airspace — trained formation pilots fly with genuinely tight separation, closer than air traffic control would ever permit between unrelated aircraft, but they do it with each pilot maintaining constant visual contact with the aircraft they're flying relative to, adjusting continuously.

The Australian Amateur-Built Community

Van's Aircraft kits, including the RV-7 model involved in this collision, are among the most widely built amateur aircraft in the world, and formation flying among owner-pilots — often built around shared type clubs or informal groups like Acro Formation — is a well-established part of that community's culture, both in Australia and internationally.