A person has been repatriated to Australia from Queenstown aboard their own private jet.
The Southern District Health Board confirmed a private jet with one pilot and no other crew arrived from Australia on Tuesday and picked up one passenger, before departing again, heading back to Australia.
It is not known who the passenger was.
The pilot had no interaction with anyone in New Zealand and only disembarked to the tarmac for refuelling and a pre-flight inspection. “Ground staff were required to wear PPE and maintain physical distancing of 4 metres," a SDHB spokeswoman said.
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The DHB said this was the first repatriation flight from Queenstown since mid-2020. Between the end of the national lockdown and mid-2020, there were “one or two similar flights”, the spokeswoman said.
A statement from Queenstown Corporate Jets Services said the flight came from Sydney. This was backed up by publicly-available flight-tracking data.
The private plane touched down in Queenstown at 12.07pm on Tuesday and left at 12.58pm.
The plane was an Embraer Phenom 300E, which can seat between 6 and 10 passengers.
The aircraft was delivered to Special Mining Services Pty Ltd, an Australian company, in early 2019, according to Embraer.
The plane is operated by Flight Options (Australia) Pty Ltd and based in Sydney.
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