Representatives of a helicopter company which employed two men who died in a crash on Thursday are due to be interviewed by specialist investigators today.

The wife of Steve Combe, the Wanaka pilot killed in a helicopter crash, says her husband was 'larger than life'.

Aviation bosses have ordered the biggest grounding of aircraft in the country's history amid fears a helicopter fault may be behind the deaths of two men.

The Civil Aviation Authority has grounded a series of helicopters after a fatal crash this week.

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 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.

A couple and their toddler who survived the crash of a TransAsia Airways plane in Taiwan changed seats just before the plane took off.

"This pilot decided to land in a narrow river without buildings because there is a residential area nearby. He did all he could do."

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.

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.

A survivor of the Taupo plane crash has described watching the plane crash into the lake as she floated to the ground as one of the "most surreal moments" of her life.

'I survived a fricking plane crash. Nope, not even kidding.' One of the survivors of the Taupo skydive plane crash is glad to be alive.

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.