Seven dead in New Zealand glacier helicopter crash

Four British tourists and two Australians are thought to be among seven people killed in a helicopter crash in New Zealand.

Seven people, six of them tourists, are dead after a commercial helicopter crashed on a scenic glacier in New Zealand.

Rescue teams located the wreckage of the helicopter inside a crevasse on Fox Glacier, but were unable to reach it because of the difficult terrain, police said. They said the pilot and six passengers were believed to have died.

The helicopter crashed at about 11am local time on the glacier, a popular tourist destination on New Zealand’s South Island.

Police said they were attempting to notify relatives before releasing the identities or nationalities of the victims. They said they would make another attempt to recover the bodies later.

Grey District mayor Tony Kokshoorn said the weather was marginal at the time of the crash, with intermittent rain showers and low cloud. “It was not ideal for helicopter flying,” he said.

He said the region had been experiencing a bumper start to the Southern Hemisphere tourist season, but bad weather had been putting pressure on some tourist operators.

“It can be a fine line,” he said. “Operators are doing their best to get people up there but obviously something went badly wrong.”

He said the glaciers in recent years have been retreating and the only way to view them up close was by helicopter.

Operators offer different packages and a basic trip typically involves a 10-minute flight to the top of the glacier, where tourists can walk about for about a half hour before returning.

Rescuers reached the scene in the afternoon, but crevasses and rugged terrain hampered their efforts.

A rescue helicopter used a winch to lower a paramedic and an alpine rescue team to the area of the crash, said Vince Cholewa, a spokesman for Maritime New Zealand. He said the area where the helicopter crashed was filled with crevasses and treacherous terrain.

He said there was low cloud in the area, but otherwise the rescuers had not been hampered by the weather.

Peter Northcote, a spokesman for the Transport Accident Investigation Commission, said the helicopter was ferrying tourists at the time. A team of investigators was planning to survey the scene.

Nine people died in 2010 when a skydiving plane crashed near the same glacier.

New Zealand relies on tourism as a major source of revenue but has been criticised by some people as having lax safety standards.

The parents of four tourists who died in the 2010 crash near Fox Glacier later wrote to prime minister John Key urging him to improve safety measures in the industry.

Mr Kokshoorn said he hoped authorities completed a thorough investigation into the latest crash to ensure the industry was safe and that tourists could have confidence that operators would make the right call in bad conditions.