Aviation NZ offers support following Fox Glacier accident

‘‘Aviation NZ would like to confirm its support to help investigations into the cause of Saturday’s fatal accident at Fox Glacier” said Aviation NZ CEO Samantha Sharif.

Aviation NZ is the industry body representing the commercial aviation sector in New Zealand.

“The aviation tourism sector is an extremely important part of the New Zealand economy and we work hard with operators to ensure that we deliver a world class service to all customers, in terms of safety, operations and visitor experience” said Sharif.

In the last 14 years, until this weekend, only one fare paying passenger had lost their life in a helicopter in NZ. Many thousands of passengers are carried safely in New Zealand helicopters every year – and our focus is to ensure that our world class safety record continues. Any fatality is one too many.

On Friday I met with our North Island tourism flight operators to work out what their key issues are for the coming summer season so we can help solve them; and we have had similar meetings with our South Island operators in recent weeks.

We’d like to reassure the public that our aviation tourism sector is extremely safe – and we work continually with industry to keep it so. We work together to develop industry best practices and implement voluntary Codes of Conduct.

We also work closely with the regulator and other agencies to analyse in detail the causes of incidents and accidents so that we can continue to keep at the forefront of aviation safety worldwide.

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