Dave Gee: Life from Right Field

I suspect someone will be getting a tap on the knuckles over in the TVNZ newsroom tomorrow...

Reports of a helicopter crashing near Wanganui tonight turned out to be considerably less substantial than first feared.

Late in their 7pm bulletin tonight, One News announced breaking news of reports of a helicopter going down.

Police later confirmed to the Dominion Post that a helicopter had indeed crashed - a small remote controlled toy chopper.

A full emergency callout was initiated when the model helicopter crash was mistaken for the real thing.

Inspector Ken Climo from the police central communications centre said a man had taken his model helicopter out for a flight and lost control of it...

The mistake was discovered when the model helicopter owner went looking for his machine and ran into police looking for a genuine helicopter wreckage.

"He drove around a few streets and left his name at a few houses, went around a corner and, hello, here are all these police cars.

"Being a typical Kiwi he thought 'I'll go and find out what's going on here', wandered up and they told him about this helicopter crash."

"He said 'I'm looking for a helicopter – but mine's a model'."

Mr Climo said unfortunately some media reported the incident as being a genuine emergency before police could establish what had actually happened.