Mountains are no more dangerous than any other terrain if you have an awareness of the hazards and possess sound decision making skills. Yes, take someone that's only flown in Kansas and put them in the mountains and they'll quickly be in over their heads. But if NZ is mountainous, then they should be getting mountain flight training as a result. Ignorance is no excuse, nor is exceeding the limits of the aircraft. We are getting more into the human factor here, though.

Flat ground can be equally dangerous- during an instrument cross country flight over the Bonneville Salt Flats at 10,000' MSL, my instructor had me remove the foggles and give him a seat of the pants constant rate level 360° turn without looking at the gauges. "Just use your vestibular senses and keep your head outside the cockpit." Meaning, fly by feel and sight alone and don't look at the gauges. No big deal, right? It was a sunny, calm day and it's just a level, constant rate turn... basic Private Pilot solo checkride stuff. So around we went and when I rolled out of the turn, we were in a 500 FPM descent. We were up so high and the horizon was so flat that I had no visual reference and coupled with my brain interpreting the increased g loading in the turn as a climb, I had instinctively and inadvertently initiating a descent to compensate for the perceived climb. The lesson was, always trust your gauges regardless of what your sense of balance is telling you, especially in IFR conditions. Had we been lower and had it been real IFR conditions where I didn't have a visual reference, that turn would have resulted in what's known as controlled flight into terrain, and that would have been pilot error. Stupid, stupid pilot error.

As a side note- if you're ever pilot in command and crash, the only answer to give the FAA and NTSB investigators is, "I don't remember" when asked what happened. If you start running your mouth about speeds and altitudes and this and that, they're going to most likely put it on pilot error. But if you say you don't remember, it's up to them to prove that you indeed screwed up. Still, most crashes occur due to pilot error.

 

Maybe that coupled with the fact that they use copters to catch deer (4 leged kind).

 

I'll use a car analogy regarding this situation.

The Ford Mustang.

You hear all the jokes about how they run people over leaving Cars & Coffee. This Robinson situation is like the families of those run over suing Ford for making a defective car. Spoiler alert: It's not a design flaw causing the accidents.

 

Helicopters don't really "fly", they're so ugly the Earth repels them.






(admission: I've been in one and they're pretty cool)