A man who died when the helicopter he was flying crashed into a hotel roof in Australia had been at his own party beforehand.

The pilot was flying alone when he crashed and the helicopter burst into flames, Queensland Police said.

Nautilus Aviation said in a statement that the man flying the helicopter, who has not been publicly named, was an employee of the company, and had been for four months.

However, he was not a pilot, had not flown in Australia before and wasn’t authorised to fly the company’s helicopters – despite holding a pilot’s licence in New Zealand.

Instead, he was a member of the ground crew.

Just before the flight, the man had been at a party with colleagues, celebrating a new ground crew job at another of the company’s bases, the firm said.

He was then somehow able to access the company’s helicopter and take off.

He died when the helicopter he was flying crashed into the roof of the DoubleTree Hilton in the north Queensland city of Cairns on Monday morning and burst into flames.

About 400 people were evacuated from the hotel and two elderly hotel guests were briefly hospitalised for smoke inhalation.

The flight was “unauthorised” and the helicopter “misappropriated”, the company said.

Australian authorities are now trying to work out how the man was able to take off from Cairns Airport, where the flight began, and what his reasoning for making the journey was, they said.

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Cairns Airport chief executive Richard Barker said in a statement on Tuesday that a review showed “no compromise of our airport fence or access points”.

The airport operated under “a federally-approved, multi-layered transport security programme,” Mr Barker added.

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After the crash two of the helicopter’s propellers came off and one landed in the pool, according to local media reports.

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