Prime Minister John Key has paid a personal tribute to one of two men who died in a helicopter crash near Queenstown yesterday.

The act of generosity claimed Chris Lau's life when flight GE235 crashed into a river in Taipei 12 days ago.

A helicopter has crashed at speed into a paddock near Te Awamutu, injuring a passenger.

Chilean mountaineers have found the wreckage of a plane that crashed in the Andes 54 years ago.

The family of a NZ citizen co-piloting the plane that crashed into a bridge and river in Taiwan are due to arrive back in the country this week, as new information is revealed.

The firefighting pilot who escaped a helicopter crash unscathed says he's happy nobody was hurt and doesn't think mechanical failure or pilot error caused the crash.

The captain of TransAsia Flight GE235 complained of "engine abnormalities" but was rebuffed when he asked for an urgent inspection of the plane shortly before its final take-off.

The co-pilot of the crashed TransAsia Airways plane was a New Zealand citizen who learned to fly in Auckland.

The captain of the AirAsia jet that crashed in December was out of his seat conducting an unusual procedure when his co-pilot apparently lost control of the plane.

A helicopter that crashed into Lake Rotorua during a scenic flight lost power due to an engine malfunction, it has been determined.

Salvage teams have begun trying to raise the fuselage of AirAsia Flight 8501 from the sea bed.

Civil Aviation Authority investigators have yet to find an obvious cause of a fatal microlight accident which killed two people in Timaru on Friday.

Two people have died in a microlight crash near Timaru.

Two gliders have landed safely with no injuries south of Auckland, despite earlier reports of a light aircraft crash.

Divers have retrieved a black box from the crashed AirAsia flight from the bottom of the Java Sea, officials say.

The pilot of a skydiving plane which suffered a suspected engine failure over Lake Taupo was on his first day of flying unsupervised when he made the call to abandon the aircraft.

Skydive instructor on his escape from the plane that nosedived into Lake Taupo this week - and how he felt jumping out of a plane today.

The first official Indonesian report on the AirAsia crash says the accident was caused by "icing" that damaged the plane's engines - a finding experts immediately doubted.

A report of a light plane crash at a Northland beach was a false alarm.

Every day more than 8 million people travel in planes, taking around 50,000 flights. For an activity that's so commonplace, flying engenders a lot of fear and superstition.

A temporary break in poor weather yesterday failed to help the search for wreckage from AirAsia Flight QZ8501.

The search area was widened because surveillance planes could not see tiny fragments of wreckage in choppy waters. And families, once again, did not know how or why their loved ones died.

Airbus has rushed two specialists to Jakarta to assist in the investigation of the disappeared A320 airliner operated by AirAsia, the budget carrier that rose from almost nothing in 2001 to be its biggest customer.

Tributes are flowing for the brave pilot who made a split-second decision to slam into water instead of crash-landing among hundreds of beach-goers at Raglan.

Woman on board small plane that spluttered and crashed into Raglan harbour yesterday, narrowly avoiding hundreds of holidaymakers.

The father of a Jordanian pilot captured by Isis after his plane crashed pleaded for his son's release, as reports emerged that the jihadists were preparing to publicly execute him.

A light plane plane has crashed into water off Raglan Beach and sunk.

A former airline boss claims the US shot down flight MH370 because the military feared it had been taken over by hackers.