Taupo plane crash: Survivors praise skydive instructors

The tourists forced to leap to safety from a skydiving plane yesterday bear no hard feelings against the company, its director said today.

The six tourists, including residents of the US and UK, had to jump - along with six instructors and the pilot - from Skydive Taupo's bright-pink Pacific Aerospace 750XL plane when its engine began failing shortly after takeoff just after midday.

This morning, the wreckage remained in Lake Taupo at Rotongaio Bay, from where it was expected to be recovered this afternoon and taken to a hangar for inspection.

All instructors were back at work today and would be interviewed by investigators, but did not want to speak publicly about the ordeal, director Roy Clements told the Herald at the company's airport hangar.

"Everyone of them had indicated they wanted to jump today, but unfortunately we won't be operating because we don't have an aircraft in range today."

They were expected to make their first jumps tomorrow morning.

He described them as "heroes".

"They were probably only doing their job, which they are trained to do, but I think at the same time, the way they dealt with it was just terrific, very calm - and that's the message we got from each of the passengers, just saying how great the instructors were."

Mr Clements said the pilot had left Taupo for several days to take some time out with his wife, while the tourists, who were all travelling the country together, had been offered another skydive.

Watch: Promo for Skydive Taupo posted on YouTube on Jan 2013

"It may not be just now... they are travelling around New Zealand, and hopefully they will come back up north again."

It had taken the tourists some time to grasp what had happened, and Mr Clements had told all of them they could contact him with questions or concerned.

Asked if they were upset with the company, he said: "No, there was nothing like that at all. They seem very understanding about what had occurred.

"The fact that the engine stopped working is a mystery to us and they understand that as well."

Mr Clements expected that mystery would not be solved today.

"Between us, we are all trying to come up with ideas as to what might have caused it, but without having the engine to look at, it's going to be impossible to say what caused this."

He estimated the plane was about nine years old, and had been used for half that time in Australia and the remainder in New Zealand.

It had been serviced regularly - as recently as last month - and to stringent CAA standards, with no defects of any note found on previous inspections.

In his several decades in the industry, he had not seen such a failure.

But he felt there was no need to improve training for such scenarios.

"I guess after any major incident, we will want to debrief, look at all the procedures and make sure everything has been done correctly.

"The training we had in place worked extremely well on the day, so I don't anticipate there will be any changes where that's a concern."

He said the major risk had been the low altitude: parachutes were usually opened at 5000ft, but as the plane plummeted towards the lake, the group had no choice but to jump from less than 2000ft.

Mr Clements admitted he had expected the worst when he was told of the pilot's mayday call, only to receive a phone call about three minutes later from the pilot, who had landed in a patch of blackberry near the lake's edge.

He expected the crash and resulting publicity would have a negative effect on the company.

"But what I think we've got to know is this wasn't a parachuting or skydiving incident, this was an aircraft incident, it was an aircraft issue, so we've got to just rely on experts to try to determine what the fault was."

Mr Clements reaffirmed his belief that skydiving was a safe sport.

Asked what message he had to those who might have been deterred from it, he said: "We do jump out of aeroplanes... [so] if you want to go for a skydive, you can guarantee it's going to be the safest plane ride you have in your life, because we have parachutes."

Additional reporting: Morgan Tait, Nikki Preston, Natalie Akoorie, Nicholas Jones, David Fisher, Patrice Dougan, Sophie Ryan, Brendan Manning and NZME.