While gliding was their passion, Bill Walker and David Speight were renowned businessmen and entrepreneurs.
Mr Walker was a fitter and turner by trade; Mr Speight a retired farmer-turned-developer.
Mr Walker established E-Type Engineering in Invercargill when he was 21, and was involved with many Think Big projects including the Tiwai aluminium smelter, and the Clyde Dam and Manapouri power station projects.
Among his tourism innovations, he built underwater viewing facilities in Milford Sound and Queenstown; a gondola and luges in Rotorua; and Queenstown's luge.
In 2004, Mr Walker told the Otago Daily Times the luge cart was one of his proudest inventions.
Another of his ideas was a post and rail fence along State Highway 6 at Ladies Mile - a property which has also become known over the past year for a life-sized stylised sculpture of a bull, made by Mr Walker from three-quarters of a tonne of Corten steel.
He retired from the Skyline board of directors last year after 29 years' service and was a director of the Queenstown Airport Corporation from 2001 to 2009.
Mr Walker was named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2004 for services to aviation and industry.
Mr Speight's development projects included the Royal Oak Precinct in Arrowtown, which he owned with Arthur Anderson.
The pair also developed the Mt Difficulty and Templars Hill vineyards in 1995, along with Bill and Shirley Macalister.
In 1983, he purchased about 55ha of land in Queenstown which he subdivided into three lots.
He built a house on one section, which he sold in 2001, and leased a second to a deer farm.
He and his wife Mairi established Speight Gardens and a five-bedroom three-bathroom home on the remaining land.
It went on the market for $3.7 million in 2012.
It is not the first time tragedy has struck the Speight family - in 1999 the couple's son, Nicholas (32), was shot and killed in northern Iraq while working as a programme manager in a United Nations-contracted landmine clearing operation.
