The death of Wānaka’s Sir Tim Wallis made national news last month, and while there has been much coverage of his aviation crashes, they are a side note to his extraordinary story. 

“Who’s counting?” Sir Tim’s son Jonathan Wallis said about those incidents at his father’s funeral at Wānaka Airport on Saturday (October 28). 

“From [Sir Tim’s ] perspective they were no more than mishaps. They were pioneering times.”

Sir Tim's wife Prue told the Wānaka App she was "amazed that Tim died quietly in bed at home after a lifetime of living dangerously".

"He’s left a very big gap in our lives."

Jonathan described his father as having had “a quintessentially unnatural life”.

Sir Tim had “a strong sense of independence, a wild charisma, a desire to live life to the full, and uncapped enthusiasm for everything deer and aviation,” he said.

“He touched so many lives in so many ways.”

A West Coaster, Sir Tim (who died on October 17, aged 85) was a businessman and aviation entrepreneur. He pioneered live deer capture from helicopters, and helped establish deer farming as a significant New Zealand industry. 

His love of World War II fighter aircraft (which dated back to his schooling in Christchurch in the 1950s) led to his finding and restoring warbirds, and establishing an Alpine Fighter Collection and the New Zealand Fighter Pilots Museum.

He founded the Warbirds Over Wānaka airshow in 1988.

In 1994 he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for services to deer farming, export, and the community. 

Jonathan said Sir Tim shaped his course through life through “a combination of making interesting choices, taking bold chances, and navigating good and bad luck”.

Some of that bad luck included a 1968 crash while flying a Hiller UH 12E, in which he broke his back. It left him with a partly paralysed left leg.

Despite the injury, his son Toby told funeral attendees on Saturday that Sir Tim never complained, had an “outstanding resistance to pain”, and inspired his four sons to follow in his footsteps.

Toby outlined stories of his extraordinary childhood with brothers Jonathan, Matthew, and Nick, and the “hero” of a father who taught them everything from camping, hunting, fishing, and diving, to flying.

Jonathan said: “Growing up with our father was a magnificent adventure”.

In 1996, when Sir Tim crashed his Spitfire Mk XIV while training for an upcoming Warbirds Over Wānaka show, he was seriously injured and no longer able to fly.

As part of his rehabilitation he was thereafter cared for by nurses, three of whom stood up at his funeral on Saturday.

“We’ve never met anyone with the strength and determination to match Tim’s,” nurse Hilary Smith said.

He liked to live life on the edge, she said, and his motto was “active body, active mind”.

Jonathan said his father was resilient to trauma and adversity, but the brain injury he suffered in 1996 may have shielded him from the full impact of the loss of sons Matthew and Nick, both of whom died in 2018 in separate helicopter accidents.

His father was “sensitive, with tremendous empathy”, who instinctively liked people, Jonathan said.

“He kept our feet on the ground and our boots dirty.

“Tim’s was a life well lived and loved and we’ll never forget him.”

Following the funeral on Saturday was an RNZAF flyover before Sir Tim was taken on his last flight in his own helicopter.

His ashes will eventually be spread in the mountains he loved, from Fiordland to Mt Aspiring National Park, as far north as the Dingleburn.

The Wallis family has invited donations in Sir Tim’s memory be made to the NZ Spinal Trust, St John or the M!nt Trust.

Read more: Sir Tim Wallis: An ‘exceptional man’ has died

PHOTOS: Supplied