Search and Rescue man honoured

It's the people who never came home that David Comber remembers best.

The Taupo man, who today was named a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to Search and Rescue, has never forgotten those who disappeared without trace.

They include Robert Leece, a dementia sufferer who went missing from Acacia Bay in 2007, and Francesca Martin, a Hamilton woman whose car was found by the road side in Wairakei in 2005 but who has never been found.

But those are the few.

Over a 20-year career in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and 34 years as a volunteer with Taupo Land Search and Rescue (LandSAR), Mr Comber, 72, has been involved in hundreds of searches and countless successful outcomes.

During his time as a pilot in the Royal New Zealand Air Force he flew mostly coastal and offshore searches and also qualified as an air directing officer for the New Zealand Rescue Co-ordination Centre.

He left the Air Force in 1983 and moved to Taupo with his family, where he offered his search management experience to the local LandSAR group.

"I see it as my community contribution. Some people do Lions, some do Rotary, I do search and rescue, but it's something I'm quite passionate about and it's working with great people, bloody good people doing something really good ... you get a lot of satisfaction from it."

Mr Comber is usually operations manager or planning and intelligence manager at the incident control centre.

"I admire the people who put packs on their backs and do the actual searching and the responsibility of the management team is to make sure that their efforts are used to the best advantage and not wasted."

From 2006 to 2011 Mr Comber served on the New Zealand LandSAR board of search and rescue and in 2016 he also became a member of the New Zealand Search and Rescue Council, the overarching body that has responsibility for New Zealand search and rescue.

He has also been the LandSAR representative on the 2012 Police SAR Review and the Mountain Safety Council.

In addition, he organises an annual weekend-long search and rescue exercise in the Taupo district.

Mr Comber said being made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit was "a total surprise" but something he was happy to accept.