New Zealand helicopter crash: two Australians and four Britons among seven killed

Police say none of seven people on board aircraft are believed to have survived, with rescue teams unable to immediately reach wreckage in crevasse

Saturday 21 November 2015 13.01 GMT Last modified on Saturday 21 November 2015 17.25 GMT

Seven people, including four British and two Australian holidaymakers, died in a helicopter crash at a popular tourist attraction on New Zealand’s South Island on Saturday.
Bad weather conditions meant that rescuers struggled to recover the bodies of the pilot and his six passengers from the wreckage of the aircraft, which went down in challenging and dangerous terrain high on the island’s Fox glacier. Other tourists were in the area at the time, many of them also being ferried in helicopters.


A paramedic had been winched down to the site of the crash and reported that there were no survivors, but a recovery effort and scene examination was “likely to take some days”, police said.

Inspector John Canning said the helicopter was in a crevasse 750 metres (2,500ft) up the valley. Debris was scattered across hundreds of metres around the crash site, which was in a “heavily crevassed” area. “I’m not going to risk any more lives. We’ve lost seven,” Canning said.
He added that his officers were liaising with the embassies of the countries concerned to inform the victims’ families. The UK Foreign Office confirmed that it had traced and contacted relatives.
The accident is not the first in New Zealand’s ice fields, an area of natural beauty that attracts many tourists and where dozens of local guides and tour operators work. Three people were hurt in a helicopter crash in June, while a man died and five others were injured last year.
Rob Jewell, chairman of the Glacier Country Tourism Group, which represents operators providing visitor services at Fox glacier and nearby Franz Josef glacier, said everyone was deeply shocked by the accident: “We’re a small-knit community here. It’s a small village and everyone knows everybody, so it’s a matter of looking after each other.
“We’re hurting. It’s a real tragedy today. We’ll just do what we can to make this as easy as we can for everybody, and obviously our thoughts are with those who lost their lives today and their families and friends. We are still piecing together all the details – once confirmed, we will put out a statement.”

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Another member of the group, Chris Alexander, said that the emergency services had tried “their damnedest” to reach the scene.
An American tourist who was on a different tour on the glacier said that no one had been aware of the crash until after they had returned to the tour office base. Alexander Baranda, a sports photographer, said flights had been cancelled earlier in the week due to poor weather, but had gone ahead Saturday morning. He had been on the mountain with 22 others in several helicopters, taking the 10-minute flight up the glacier before a three-hour guided tour along the ice.
A spokesman for Alpine Adventures, which operated the single-engine Squirrel helicopter, confirmed it was on a scenic flight with six passengers on board.
New Zealand’s Transport Accident Investigation Commission (TAIC) said it would investigate the cause of the crash and had sent four officials to Fox glacier. The crash comes weeks after the TAIC admitted there had been flaws in its 2012 report into an aircraft crash on Fox in September 2010, when nine people, including four tourists, died.
Overseas relatives of some of the victims have been highly critical of TAIC’s handling of the investigation.