A mother who lost a son in the Air NZ Airbus crash off France is saddened to see blame being meted out to the people involved.

Air NZ has hit out at an aviation safety specialist's interpretation of what went on before an Airbus A320 crashed into the Mediterranean off France in 2008.

Air New Zealand crew encouraged the pilots of an Airbus 320 to carry out tests minutes before the plane crashed off the coast of France, a specialist said.

Experts for French prosecutors probing the crash of an Air NZ jet in 2008 agree with air safety investigations which blame human error.

All seven people aboard an Airbus A320 test flight died when it crashed in 2008. Air NZ said it could not confirm a report that an announcement would be made tonight regarding the crash.

The search for a plane carrying one of Australia's richest men and the entire board of one of the country's mining companies resumed last night.

Four soldiers, three of them Australian, have been killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

Six Australian mining executives, including one of the country's richest men, breached protocol by boarding a plane that has gone missing in West Africa.

A light plane has gone down in Sydney's southwest, killing two people aboard and narrowly missing children on their way to school.

An experienced helicopter pilot from has been killed after hitting power lines in Australia after surviving a similar accident in 2008.

A plane has successfully landed despite problems with its landing gear that forced it to abort several landing attempts.

Ruben van Assouw joins a list of more than a dozen known examples of sole survivors from air disasters.

The Netherlands has gone into mourning over the deaths of at least 61 Dutch citizens among the 104 people on a plane that crashed in Libya.

The head of the European Parliament has described the survival of a 10-year-old in a Libyan plane crash that killed over 100 people as "truly a miracle."