Nine people, including four foreigners, were killed when a skydiving plane crashed and burst into flames at a popular New Zealand tourist spot yesterday, officials said.
The plane went down near the airstrip at Fox Glacier, a central attraction in the UNESCO-designated World Heritage area on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island.
“All nine people on board were killed,” a police spokesman said.
PHOTO: AFP
He listed the dead as the pilot, four New Zealand males and tourists from Ireland, England, Australia and Germany without detailing their ages or gender.
Initial details of the tragedy were unclear because of the remoteness of the area, but the police spokesman said he understood the plane burst into flames after it crashed.
New Zealand Transport Minister Stephen Joyce said the Skydive New Zealand crash was the country’s first aviation accident of this magnitude since an Air Adventures chartered Piper Navajo Chieftain crashed on landing near Christchurch in 2003, killing eight people.
“Details remain sketchy and it is too soon to speculate on exactly what has led to this accident,” he said, adding that the crash was being investigated.
An Australian official said an 18-year-old man from the southeastern state of Victoria was among those who died when the Fletcher FU-24 turbine powered plane crashed.
“The skydiving aircraft crashed while trying to take off, killing the pilot, four skydiving instructors and three other foreign tourists,” a spokesman for the New Zealand Department of Foreign Affairs said.
Skydive New Zealand, the only skydiving company in the area, made no immediate comment on the tragedy.
However, a message on the company’s answerphone said: “Unfortunately, we will not be skydiving for the rest of the day.”
Westland District mayor Maureen Pugh told Television New Zealand the tourists were going up with instructors to do a tandem skydive in perfect conditions.
“It’s a well-established company down here and has a huge reputation,” she said.
“Nobody is even trying to guess what went wrong, but it had tragic consequences. We’re just so devastated,” Pugh added.
The five New Zealanders on board were all locals and well-known in the tight-knit Fox community with a population of fewer than 300 people.
A spokesman at the Fox Glacier Inn motel said everyone in the town had been to the airstrip trying to help where they could.
“It’s a small town and everyone knows everyone,” he said.
Police said the ill-fated aircraft was a Fletcher fixed-wing, the type operated by Skydive New Zealand, which has been involved in the skydiving and aviation industry for more than 25 years.
The disaster was the worst air tragedy in New Zealand in nearly 17 years. Nine people also died in a plane crash in October 1993 at nearby Franz Josef Glacier.
The following year, seven people were killed when a sightseeing helicopter crashed near Fox Glacier.
The west coast of New Zealand’s South Island attracts thousands of tourists annually, brought to the area by the stunning mountain scenery and fjords.
Travelers, many of them from abroad, support a burgeoning tourism industry catering for a range of interests, including high-adrenaline sports and trekking.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS