A single strand of old fence wire, lying low in long grass and almost impossible to see from the air, wrapped around the tail rotor of a pest control helicopter and brought it down in the hills north of Wellington, killing both men on board. That is the finding of a preliminary report from the Civil Aviation Authority into the crash near Paekākāriki on 28 January, released this week.
The Hughes 269C helicopter, registered ZK-HGP, came down on a steep spur in the hills above the Transmission Gully motorway. The pilot, 54 year old Joseph Keeley of Tauhara, and his crewmember, 25 year old Cole Ritchie of Wharepapa South, were both killed. The two men were working as pest control contractors, culling feral goats and deer in rugged country that has long been a stronghold for browsing animals.
According to the report, the crew had been working through the morning when the semi-automatic rifle the crewmember was using stopped cycling ammunition. Following standard practice, the pilot set the helicopter down on a small clearing on a spur so the firearm could be cleared safely on the ground rather than in the air. It was a routine, sensible decision, the kind of pause that happens regularly in aerial culling work.
The danger came on the way back up. As the helicopter lifted off and began to move away from the clearing, its left skid hooked a wire from an old stock fence running across the spur. The fence was in poor condition, lying close to the ground and partly buried under regenerating scrub. A length of about four metres of wire pulled free as the aircraft climbed away, and instead of simply dropping clear it was drawn up into the tail rotor at the back of the helicopter.
With the wire caught in the tail rotor, the helicopter yawed sharply to the right. The pilot applied large left pedal input to try to counter the spin, but the yaw was beyond recovery. The aircraft turned through the air and descended, striking the terrain roughly 100 metres from where it had taken off. Investigators ruled out both the weather and any mechanical failure of the helicopter itself as causes.
One of the more sobering details in the report concerns what the crew could actually see. The helicopter was fitted with an onboard video recorder, and footage from it showed that the fence was very unlikely to have been visible to either the pilot or the crewmember. It was old, slumped low to the ground and screened by the vegetation that had grown up around it over the years. In other words, the men had no realistic way of knowing the hazard was there.
That is part of what makes the finding so difficult. There was no obvious error, no risky manoeuvre and no warning sign that a routine landing and takeoff on a quiet hillside would end the way it did. A piece of derelict farm infrastructure, the sort of thing that sits forgotten in paddocks and gullies all over rural New Zealand, became the difference between an ordinary day at work and a fatal accident.
The Civil Aviation Authority stressed that the document released this week is a preliminary report rather than a final verdict. A spokesperson said its purpose was to set out the factual information known at this stage while the wider investigation continues. A final report, which may carry formal safety recommendations for the aerial operations industry, is still to come. Low level flying for hunting, culling, mustering and spraying is among the most demanding work in New Zealand aviation, and lessons drawn from individual accidents often feed back into training and operating procedures across the sector.
Both men were named by police in the weeks after the crash. Kāpiti Mana Area Commander Inspector Renée Perkins said at the time that emergency services, aviation authorities, local iwi and regional partners had worked closely together in extremely challenging terrain to respond to the accident. Police, the Civil Aviation Authority and Victim Support were all assisting the families.
For Joseph Keeley, the crash was a cruel end to a long flying career. According to the New Zealand Herald, the pilot had survived two earlier helicopter crashes during his years in the air, and in one of them he was remembered for his actions in helping a colleague to safety. His death in a third crash, after so many hours flying in some of the country’s most unforgiving terrain, has been felt deeply in the close knit world of aerial pest control, where pilots and shooters often know one another by name.
Aerial culling remains a central tool in New Zealand’s long campaign against introduced browsing animals, which strip native forest and compete with protected species. The work takes pilots into narrow gullies, across steep faces and close to the ground, where margins are small and obstacles are easy to miss. The Paekākāriki crash is a reminder of how unforgiving that environment can be, and of how an ordinary hazard left over from a different era of farming can reach up and bring down a modern aircraft.
You can read the original coverage from RNZ here, the police naming of the two men here, and the tributes to pilot Joseph Keeley reported by the New Zealand Herald here.
Have you worked in aerial pest control or low level flying, or do you live near country where these operations happen? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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