Colin Richard Forman had trained at the Cessnock Nationwide Aviation Space Academy in New South Wales, where he topped his course -- Blue Flight -- and earned a trophy he would later place at the center of a makeshift altar in his flat. He found work with Connellan Airways, known locally as Connair, the small airline that served Central Australia's remote communities and cattle stations. His seven weeks at Connair were, by his own later account in letters found after his death, the happiest of his life. When he was dismissed, he wrote in his logbook on the date of his sacking: "Sentenced to death this date." By late 1976, Forman was living in Mount Isa, Queensland, scraping together a living flying occasional charter flights in a single-engine Cessna. He told a fellow Aero Club member and local journalist, "If I don't get a job by Christmas then you will get to know, and through you most of the world will know."

On 3 January 1977, Forman destroyed the interior of his one-bedroom flat in Mount Isa, piling the wreckage in a corner and arranging it into what investigators later described as an altar. His aviation trophy sat on top, his logbook open in front of it. He then drove approximately 2,000 kilometres to Wyndham in Western Australia, stopping overnight in the Northern Territory town of Katherine. At Wyndham Airport on 5 January, he found that the larger aircraft he had intended to steal was in use by the Royal Flying Doctor Service. He took a Beechcraft 58 Baron instead, registration VH-ENA. Alice Springs lay four hours of flying time to the southeast, and Forman had planned to arrive at 10 am, during Connair's morning tea break, when the most employees would be gathered in the complex. He failed to account for the one-and-a-half-hour time difference between Western Australia and the Northern Territory. He arrived at 11 am.

Forman flew the stolen Baron into the Connair complex at Alice Springs Airport. The attack killed four Connair employees in addition to Forman himself. A secretary was badly burned in the crash and fire; she died of her injuries in hospital five days later. Four other employees were injured, two of them seriously. Letters addressed to the Department of Transport were discovered during the investigation. In them, Forman described his employment issues following his dismissal and detailed his plan. He wrote that his aim was "to cause Connair the maximum amount of loss and hardship." Some media outlets erroneously attributed more inflammatory language to his logbook's final entry, but the investigation established that the logbook contained only the flight details and the words "Suicide Mission" and "THE END."

The Connellan air disaster shattered a small aviation community in one of Australia's most isolated towns. Connellan Airways, founded by the pioneering bush pilot Eddie Connellan, had been a lifeline for remote communities across the Northern Territory since 1939. The airline survived the attack but was sold to East-West Airlines in 1980. For the employees and families who lived through that January morning, the grief was compounded by the randomness of it -- a young man's rage at losing a job he had held for less than two months, directed at colleagues who had simply been at work. Alice Springs Airport, the same strip of tarmac where Ansett Australia Flight 232 had been hijacked just five years earlier, carried the weight of two aviation tragedies before the decade was out. The disaster is now marked in the town's memory, a reminder of how violence can find even the most remote places.