Photo: 123RF
Life-saving helicopter flights are being increasingly used in disasters such as Cyclone Gabrielle, with Fire and Emergency's annual helicopter bill more than doubling to $7 million.
But one of its top aviation roles - Air Division Commander (ADC) - was so vague it amounted to "fairy dust", said Fire and Emergency (FENZ) head of aviation Stephen Bishop in March this year.
In emails released under the Official Information Act, Bishop said the ADC role had "no training pathways, qualifications, currency or competency assessment".
"You magically achieve it by fairy dust! Yet the function of the role is 100% needed," said Bishop.
Another of his memos, written last year, warned that a core gap was "no aviation common operating picture for national emergencies".
'Life/death decisions on who they rescued first'
The demands on aviation coordinators during Cyclone Gabrielle were unprecedented - the most ever seen outside of wartime.
More than 3000 flights doing 6000 tasks took place in the hours and days after the storm hit in February 2023.
It was highly successful, a top manager said.
"Undoubtedly the actions taken by all involved at Bridge Pa [chopper-launching airfield] save many lifes, [sic] countless families and people were rescued from the water and rooftops within the first 24/48 hours," said a review initiated by Bishop in the weeks that followed.
"I do remain extremely proud of the team."
Pilots and air crew work for private, contracted chopper companies and are separate from FENZ and civil defence aviation personnel.
But the stress of the task revealed gaps in the system.
The flight coordination teams - drawn from fire, police, civil defence and ambulance - were not properly prepared and did not collaborate well enough.
"Lots of intel flights flown, but no one on the ground to collate and feed back," said the review, adding that data overload was another problem.
There were also psychological health and well-being issues that needed to be worked on.
"This was a traumatic exposure event with mass casualties, and in the early stages preparing for significant numbers of fatalities, the team experienced having to make life/death decisions on who they rescued first."
An email referring to a review by USAID of the help it gave New Zealand in the cyclone said an observation was "the coordination of heli bases [was] not done well".
Blank walls and rising bills
All this could be seen in emails and reports newly released under the OIA.
FENZ blanked out some parts relating to what did not work well - while keeping in all that did work - and Bishop's "wish list".
The agency is New Zealand's prime responder to storms, and told RNZ it had helped other agencies make improvements in the past 18 months, such as with air safety training and coordination.
But it did not provide documentation to back that up.
One problem with Cyclone Gabrielle was a concern that so many choppers going up and down might hit each other.
The "biggest challenge was coordination and collaboration between multiple agencies and need to deconflict airspace", though there were no significant near-misses, the review said.
The large number of flights landed FENZ with a $3.2m bill in 2022-23.
A year later, the bill had risen to nearly $6m and is now more than $7m. Total annual hours of emergency chopper use have risen from 966 to 1920.
'Until now we have not been able to look at the training'
But Bishop in mid-2024 warned that FENZ had known for a long time that aviation was a "high risk" for it.
While a lot of that was dealt with after the Tasman fires in 2019, "until now we have not been able to look at the training we provide our people".
They were not trained to know the risks they faced. This is similar to the warning FENZ got about lack of landslide training, after two volunteer fire-fighters died at Muriwai during the cyclone.
"Wrong people been given the wrong level of training at the wrong point in their pathway," Bishop said.
"Current training for basic aircraft safety awareness is inconsistent. No training provided for stations, brigades who regularly use aircraft for fire fighting,
outer island response" and road crashes.
Another report said FENZ and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) were "working hard, as resources allow, to champion and implement a more strategic and unified approach to aviation response across the country".
Training, and contracts with private chopper companies were being improved.
"It is not a quick fix and will take some time and as with all aspects require additional resources," a group manager wrote in January 2024.
"We have some gaps around the country - Auckland, Northland, South Canterbury are my main areas of concern."
The agency told RNZ its aviation specialists showed "bravery and dedication" in Gabrielle's extreme conditions.
Its operational improvements since the start of last year included better safety awareness and training; more electronic datakeeping and invoicing; and a strengthened inter-agency CatPlan (Catastrophic Planning).
"This has a focus on shared air operations planning and resource alignment across large-scale emergencies to support a more unified national response and clearer operational roles between agencies," it said in a statement this week.
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