Auckland Star Archive
November 26, 1993 air accident New Zealand Police Aérospatiale AS 355F-1 (ZK-HIT) and Piper PA-28-181 (ZK-ENX) collision over Auckland. Debris landed on motorway at Spaghetti Junction. Four people died.
Friday, November 26. 1993, 5.34pm. It was bright and sunny and the Eagle police helicopter had been flying missions all day. The early crew finished in the afternoon and their three colleagues on the late shift took over to keep watch over Auckland. But in a moment, everything changed.
Eagle was hovering over the Southern Motorway after reports of a car crash when it and a traffic spotting plane collided, hundreds of metres above the intersection of Queen St and Karangahape Rd.
Many Aucklanders watched in horror - from the street, from cars and from high-rise office towers - as burning wreckage from both aircraft crashed to the ground. The main body of Eagle landed on the Northwestern motorway while its main rotor landed in Grafton Cemetery. Other debris was scattered over a wide area including on the roof of a church in Upper Queen St.
Eagle pilot Ross Harvey, 41, Sergeant Lindsay "Lou" Grant, 39, Constable Alastair Sampson, 27, and the plane's pilot, Allan Connors, 28, were all killed but there were no fatalities or serious injuries on the ground, the debris somehow missing hundreds of cars on the roads below.
Constable Mark Gray had just finished work and he and workmate Brian Pilkington headed to a Parnell bar, close to Eagle's base at Mechanics Bay, for an after-work drink.
When they arrived details of a breaking news story were flashed on television. "There was a whole lot of smoke, from what I could see on the TV, and I asked someone what it was and he said, 'The police helicopter has crashed' and I thought, 'God I hope that's not true'."
He said to Mr Pilkington: "I think the boys might have been in a crash," and they hurried back to base. When they walked through the doors they found "pandemonium".
"At that stage all we knew was there had been a collision with another aircraft over the cental city area and it took many, many hours before we had confirmation that anyone had perished."
The news left him and other team members numb. "We lost our Sergeant [Lou Grant] and Al Sampson was a good mate of mine, we used to play golf most weeks, and these young guys that come on the unit ...
"You get quite close to them because you train them up from scratch ... a tight relationship develops because it's such a closed environment."
The next few hours were frantic.
Read more and Photos: http://www.nzherald.co.nz
Related:
http://www.taic.org.nz/AviationReports
http://www.stuff.co.nz
