Double Six crash

what happened

On the afternoon of 6 June 1976 a Sabah Air Nomad aircraft flying from Labuan came down in shallow water off Kampung Sembulan, about two kilometres short of Kota Kinabalu airport. All 11 people on board died. Among them were Chief Minister Tun Fuad Stephens, four other members of the state government, two senior state officials, the secretary to the federal finance minister, the chief minister's bodyguard, the chief minister's son and the pilot. The date gave the event its name in Sabah: Double Six.

The political weight of the loss came from its timing. Fuad Stephens had been Sabah's first chief minister at the formation of Malaysia in 1963 and had proposed the name Sabah itself. He had returned to office only weeks earlier, sworn in on 14 April 1976 after Berjaya won that April's state election and displaced the USNO government. He died 53 days later. His deputy, Harris Salleh, became chief minister and held the post until April 1985. Eight days after the crash, on 14 June 1976, the state signed the petroleum agreement providing a 5 per cent cash payment under the Petroleum Development Act framework, an arrangement that has been argued about in Sabah politics ever since.

For 46 years the official investigation stayed classified. Harris Salleh, who had spent those decades answering insinuations about his own role, went to court in 2022 to have it released; the Kota Kinabalu High Court ordered declassification, the federal cabinet approved it on 5 April 2023, and Transport Minister Anthony Loke made the report public on 12 April 2023. The report, completed in January 1977, found no evidence of sabotage, fire or explosion, and gave the probable cause as a centre of gravity well outside the aft limit that left the pilot unable to control the aircraft on approach. It also recorded that the pilot had flown twice earlier that day and had exceeded his standard duty period. Australia, whose government factory built the Nomad, released its own records shortly afterwards.

Release did not settle everything. Datuk Donald Mojuntin, whose father died in the crash, has asked why the flying controls failed if the airframe was intact, and why the file was withheld so long; families raised the possibility of legal action and then set it aside on grounds of cost. The question of whether the 5 per cent agreement would have looked different had Fuad Stephens lived remains a live argument, with Conrad Mojuntin saying he would never have accepted that figure and Harris Salleh saying he supported the parliamentary arrangement and that the terms were a federal matter in any case. Joseph Pairin Kitingan has accused Harris Salleh of acting alone; Harris rejects that.

Fifty years on, on 6 June 2026, families and state officials laid wreaths at the Sembulan memorial. Speaking there, Donald Mojuntin framed the day as a reason for Sabahans to unite and to defend the state's rights. For a first-time voter, the useful point is that Double Six sits at the junction of two things that still shape Sabah politics: the abrupt loss of a generation of state leaders, and the petroleum settlement signed in the days that followed.