The rescue helicopter that has been flying out of Hastings since late July is the eighth replacement machine to enter service in New Zealand since the start of 2024, the Government confirmed today, in a $27.3 million programme to modernise a fleet ministers describe as having been the oldest in the developed world.
In a statement released this afternoon, Associate Health Minister Casey Costello said the Airbus H145 D3 operated by Search and Rescue Services Limited in Hawke’s Bay is the eighth new or near-new aircraft to come into operation in the past two and a half years. The others are based in Auckland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Greater Wellington, Nelson and Tasman, Canterbury and on the West Coast.
“In 2024, New Zealand’s helicopter fleet was the oldest in the developed world and the coalition government has invested to fix that,” Costello said.
The money behind the programme comes jointly from Health New Zealand and the Accident Compensation Corporation, spread across 2024 and 2025, and is meant to deliver 16 newer aircraft in total. The first tranche was announced in October 2024, with a second round of funding following. Part of the thinking is standardisation. Moving the country’s air ambulance operators towards a single common aircraft type makes maintenance simpler, lets crews and aircraft be rotated between bases more easily, and cuts the amount of type-specific training pilots need.
“Our air ambulance helicopters play a vital role in saving lives around New Zealand, and this is particularly true for those living in remote, rural or regional areas,” Costello said.
She said the new machines “provide improved safety, more reliable service, a better capacity to respond in bad weather conditions, reduced maintenance costs, greater fuel efficiency and better operational performance”.
For Hawke’s Bay, the aircraft went operational on 29 July, when it took over from the yellow BK117 that had served the region since 2018. The trust behind the service says the H145 D3 offers a quieter cabin, more room to work on a patient in the air, and better handling at night and in difficult terrain, which matters in a region where a large share of missions involve farms, forestry blocks, remote coastline and the ranges inland. The helicopter flies around 400 missions a year, covering eastern and lower North Island territory well beyond Hawke’s Bay itself.
Costello said the new helicopter “will strengthen air ambulance response across the region, supporting patients with life-threatening conditions, those who cannot be reached by road ambulance, and critically ill patients requiring inter-hospital transfer with specialist intensive care teams”.
That last category is easy to overlook. A good deal of what rescue helicopters do is not plucking trampers off a ridge. It is moving a patient who is already in a hospital bed to a bigger hospital with an intensive care unit or a specialist surgical team, with critical care staff on board keeping them alive for the duration of the flight. For a country where the specialist services are concentrated in a handful of centres, that shuttle is a permanent part of the health system rather than an emergency add-on.
The Hawke’s Bay service also changed its principal sponsor when the new aircraft arrived, with the Wallace Foundation taking over from long-time naming rights partner Lowe Corporation. Trust chair Blair O’Keeffe put the point about who actually pays for all this plainly. “The community helps keep this helicopter flying, day in and day out,” he said.
He is not exaggerating, and it is the part of the story the announcement does not cover. Government money buys the airframes and funds a share of each mission, but the rescue helicopter trusts remain not-for-profits carrying an annual gap they have to fill themselves through donations, sponsorships, grants and local fundraising. Canterbury West Coast Air Rescue tells supporters flatly that “we need to raise $6m each year to provide this critical service”, for an operation covering 730,000 people and more than 18,000 missions since it began. Wellington’s Life Flight says it “relies on the kindness of the community, businesses, and volunteers to keep flying”, and reports that “each week 28 people need time-critical aeromedical care”. In 2025, it says, 1,844 people received that care.
So the new aircraft do not end the annual fundraising drives, the golf days and the collection buckets. If anything, newer and better equipped helicopters raise the running costs, because the specialist medical fit-out, the training and the maintenance regime all move up with the aircraft. Several trusts have run separate appeals for the equipment and training that go with their replacement machines, on top of the Crown funding for the helicopters themselves.
The programme is not finished. Costello said “by June next year, a further eight replacement helicopters will begin operating in remaining parts of the North Island and in Christchurch”, which would complete the 16 and leave the country flying a substantially younger and more uniform fleet than it had at the start of 2024.
“People working in our air ambulance service do an incredible job and the investment to upgrade our helicopter fleet is helping to ensure best outcomes for everyone,” Costello said.
For anyone living an hour or more from a base hospital, the practical measure of all this is simple enough. It is whether a helicopter can get airborne in bad weather at two in the morning, find a paddock in the dark, and get someone to a surgical team in time. A newer aircraft with better automation and better night capability shifts those odds. The rest, as the Hawke’s Bay trust keeps pointing out, still comes down to whoever puts money in the bucket.
Have you or someone you know been flown by a rescue helicopter? Do you support your local trust? Tell us 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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