Bill Black (pilot)
New Zealand fixed-wing and helicopter pilot
William Arthur Black (18 August 1943 – 1 July 2020) was a New Zealand fixed-wing and helicopter pilot. He was one of the pioneers of live deer capture from helicopters in Fiordland in the 1960s, and was involved in over 500 search and rescue operations. In the 1977 Queen's Silver Jubilee and Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, for services to search and rescue operations, and in 2014 he was awarded the Jean Batten Memorial Trophy by the Honourable Company of Air Pilots for his contributions to New Zealand aviation.
Black was born in Owaka on 18 August 1943, and died in Invercargill on 1 July 2020, aged 76 years.
“Bill Black (pilot)” enters the record as new Zealand fixed-wing and helicopter pilot. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bill, Black and pilot can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 18, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q96911980. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943, 2020, 1977 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Black (pilot)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.