{"id":10987,"date":"2024-08-14T07:42:28","date_gmt":"2024-08-13T19:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=10987"},"modified":"2024-08-14T07:42:28","modified_gmt":"2024-08-13T19:42:28","slug":"nz-pilot-killed-in-cairns-helicopter-crash-named","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=10987","title":{"rendered":"NZ Pilot killed in Cairns helicopter crash named"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Kristy Sexton-McGrath, Christopher Testa,<\/b>\u00a0and\u00a0Sarah Richards<\/b>, ABC Far North<\/p>\n

The pilot killed when a helicopter crashed into a Cairns hotel roof has been identified as 23-year-old Blake Wilson of New Zealand, who had been working as a ground crew employee with the company for four months.<\/p>\n

Nautilus Aviation CEO Aaron Finn\u00a0confirmed late Tuesday afternoon<\/a>\u00a0that a member of the company’s ground staff “gained unauthorised access to [the] helicopter hangar and misappropriated one of [the] helicopters”.<\/p>\n

He said the employee held a New Zealand pilot’s licence but had never flown in Australia.<\/p>\n

Finn said there was a gathering of company employees on Sunday night, including off-duty-pilots, celebrating a promotion of the man who flew the helicopter.<\/p>\n

“This was a privately organised send-off for the individual involved in Monday morning’s incident, who was recently promoted to a ground crew position at another one of our bases,” Finn said.<\/p>\n

“This was not a work event and had been coordinated by friends.”<\/p>\n

Finn said the company had undergone interviews with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and Queensland Police Service.<\/p>\n

rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Kristy Sexton-McGrath, Christopher Testa,\u00a0and\u00a0Sarah Richards, ABC Far North The pilot killed when a helicopter crashed into a Cairns hotel roof has been identified as 23-year-old Blake Wilson of New Zealand, who had been working as a ground crew employee with the company for four months. Nautilus Aviation CEO Aaron Finn\u00a0confirmed late Tuesday afternoon\u00a0that a member […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10989,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10987\/revisions\/10989"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}