When Rick Lucas heard a helicopter had crashed in dense bush just a couple of minutes’ flight from his home, he had no idea one of the victims on board was the man who had once pulled him from the wreckage of another crash decades ago.
Lucas said he would not have survived that crash in the late 90s if it weren’t for the actions of Joseph Keeley, who died last week when the craft he was flying crashed in the Paekākāriki Hill area.
Keeley, 54, had previously survived two helicopter crashes, including the one he saved Lucas from, but his third crash claimed his life and that of his passenger, 25-year-old Cole Ritchie on January 28.
The pair were working as pest contractors working on Transmission Gully when their chopper went down, prompting an intense, multi-agency recovery operation in the rugged terrain.
Lucas attended Keeley’s funeral yesterday, and reminisced with other attendees about a time in 1998 when Keeley saved his life in the Ruahine Ranges.
“Without his intervention and what he did on that night, undoubtedly I wouldn’t have survived,” he told the Herald.
In May 1998, the pair were working together in venison recovery - Keeley as the pilot and Lucas as the shooter.
As they pulled off a hill in the Ruahine Ranges with a load of deer, the chopper had a mechanical failure about 150ft above the trees.
“We sort of descended like a dart, if you like, ripping the tail boom off the helicopter and leaving it in the top of a big rata tree.”
They hit a slip in the bush, sliding down it, before another rata tree came at them through the cockpit, hitting Lucas in the chest and face.
Lucas lost consciousness as the fuel tanks ruptured and sprayed fuel forward.
“I awoke to Joe standing over me, and he’d pulled me out of the wreckage.”
Down below the violently burning wreckage, the pair discussed the states they were in.
Lucas had 11 broken ribs, two punctured lungs - one of which was collapsed, as well as a broken sternum, and a broken cheekbone.
“That was it,” Lucas laughed, “just a little fender bender.”
And Keeley, well, he had a gash on his shin.
Keeley took his coworker’s cell phone and headed off, down a creek and up a ridge, managing to find cell phone reception all while in the dark Ruahine Ranges.
In the thick bush, neither the rescue helicopter nor Air Force services could get to them. One of Lucas’ own highly experienced pilots got in a chopper with a paramedic and a crewman.
They dropped a stretcher out and the paramedic stabilised Lucas, before the rescue helicopter from Taupō flew over and got him to Palmerston North Hospital.
Lucas was partially stable, with tubes in both his lungs, until his second lung collapsed and he was put in ICU in a drug-induced coma.
“When I got to the hospital, they told me if I hadn’t have got to the specialist care, they reckon I had 20 minutes left,” he said.
Thanks to Keeley’s actions, the helicopter with the paramedic got to Lucas within an hour and a half of the crash.
Keeley had also lost his own father in a helicopter crash in the 80s.
Almost three decades after Keeley saved Lucas’ life, Lucas’ youngest son saw the news that a chopper had crashed a one-and-a-half-minute flight from their farm in the Paekākāriki Hill area.
“I didn’t know it was Joe at that stage,” Lucas said.
Lucas, now in the business of commercial lifting, sent out his chopper in case they could be of any help.
Seeing two Westpac rescue helicopters on the ground, Lucas jumped on the radio and talked to authorities, establishing that “it was not a rescue, it was going to be a recovery”.
Being a small industry, Lucas’ phone was ringing for two days straight with people checking up to make sure it wasn’t him - but also people saying, “it’s Joe”.
After authorities had recovered Keeley and Ritchie, Lucas helped fly the wreckage out on Friday.
It was “sobering” for Lucas to see the news of his former colleague’s passing.
“I can’t speak highly enough of what Joe did for me, and I dearly wish that I’d had the opportunity to express that while he was alive,” he said.
He didn’t believe the accident was a reflection on the industry, but likely just an unfortunate incident.
He remembered Keeley as a great bloke who was terrific at his job.
“Joe’s character was bigger than Texas,” he said.
“For Joe, and young Cole, it’s terribly terribly sad.”
Sammy Carter is a journalist for the New Zealand Herald covering news in the Wellington region. She has previously worked at the Rotorua Daily Post.