A Flying Visit

This Sunday I was offered, and sensibly took, a great opportunity. My pilot friend David had to fly to Tauranga, a city in the Bay of Plenty, about 90 miles Southeast of Auckland, and invited me along for a ride in his Cessna 150. Sunday morning dawned bright and clear, and I was ready for takeoff at 7 am...

The Cessna 150 is only a small plane, and David and I are both tall, with long legs, and getting in (and out again for that matter) was interesting, to say the least...

I got the left hand seat, because en route David wanted to practice some instructional techniques, and I was his tame student pilot for the morning.

We took off from David's private airstrip, set in beautiful farmland south of where I live.

Here's the view after takeoff, in the early morning light.The trip went well, except for air turbulence, which knocked us around quite a bit at times. we were only flying at around 2500 feet, and the strong Southerly wind rolling over the hills below us made the air quite rough.

Despite this I received my trial flying lesson. I practiced the effects of control on the aircraft, and gentle turns, which went very well . Comically we left the first lesson to last, and finally went through the principles of straight and level flight. I was able to recover from an unusual attitude quite readily after my practice, and i felt very confident

It was a very good experience for me, but even better, after our practice lesson, I took the controls and flew the plane for the second half of the flight.

The final stages of the flight to Tauranga took us along the coast, and unfortunately back into the bumpy air, which made me a little nauseous.

Here we're approaching Tauranga, and David has the airport in sight, at the top of the screens.

The reason for our visit was aviation-related. David owns the Hawker Hunter jet fighter ZK-JIL which I wrote about in a previous blog, and presently the Hunter *lives* in the aircraft museum at the airport, between flights.
The Hunter is due for some servicing; she needs the ejection seat overhauled, and the parachute repacked, and some cockpit work doing, before she flies again. So David was there to pick up some items from the plane, and to see how things were going. One of the items was the parachute, which I'll repack shortly back at home...

We parked across from the museum hangar (that's our little Cessna in the background in the left-hand picture), and went over to see what was happening. Very soon my armourer friend Glen appeared, and began his seat servicing work. in the right-hand picture Glen has had the cockpit canopy removed, and he's explaining the workings of the seat to the airport fire officer, just in case a rescue is ever required.

The museum, I should mention, is only small, and a little crowded, but has a fine range of aircraft on display, as well as lots of smaller items, models and pictures, etc..
One notable addition to the museum is David's SECOND Hunter, a 2-seater, which will probably not fly again. She's been re-assembled in the museum, and steps have been provided so that visitors can climb in the cockpit and play at pilots....

All too soon it was time to go again, and we taxied out to the runway and took off back to Auckland.

Here are a couple of views of Tauranga as we climbed out. The city is almost surrounded by harbours and inlets, and is a great place for boating and fishing. In the second picture, the brown hole in the middle of the view is the site of a major landslide that claimed several houses in a severe storm some months ago.

We climbed to 5500 feet for a smoother return flight, but on the way up we encountered considerably more turbulence, and we were knocked around quite a lot - it was like a roller-coaster ride! The cause of the turbulence was the Kaimai Mountains, to the south of us, which made the airflow of the southerly wind very rough indeed. Here is the highest mountain in the range, Te Aroha.We got back to South Auckland just after 11, a great morning out and a fine flying experience for me.

The last two pictures show the final approach back into David's strip - with those trees on the right it looks MUCH more like the Valley of Death than it did on take-off....

Big Boys Toys - Playing with Jets

I've been very lucky in life, in many ways...

I always liked aircraft as a boy, and when I joined the Royal Air Force, I naturally had quite a bit to do with planes, which for several years was wonderful. Later, after the RAF, I worked with smaller planes, as a parachute instructor, but eventually that had to end too.

So imagine my joy, at the end of the Millennium, when a vintage British jet fighter, a Hawker Hunter, appeared at my local airfield, in private hands. This machine was almost 50 yrs old when it arrived, and is an example of the elegant aircraft the British aircraft industry used to produce.

In service I never worked on Hunters - I missed them by a couple of years - and finally here was a chance to get to see one close up.

But wait, as they say - there's more!!

The new owner, a former fighter pilot, and now an airline pilot, decided that he wanted to fit a live ejection seat, which would literally fire him out of the plane in an emergency, and naturally he needed a good parachute too. Enter John the Parachute Man....

The parachute assembly I was given to prepare was rather old, and the harness really needed replacing, but I wasn't able to procure a new one at a sensible price. Nor was I strictly qualified to make a new harness, but I WAS qualified to *replace all the webbing on the old one*, if you get the idea...:) The end result was entirely acceptable, and the owner was delighted.

Preparing the ejection seat was a task to be done by an expert, and an RNZAF armourer, Glen, took on that task, and I got to help him - imagine playing with stuff like that. Many a night was spent in a gloomy hangar helping Glen dismantle and test the seat components - a mixture of clockwork and gunpowder, more or less, until the device was ready for installation.

John and the *Hot Seat*, Easter 1999

We finally installed the seat on Easter Day 1999, a tricky operation which we later streamlined. It was to be another year before the Hunter made her first flight in New Zealand, and since then she has been an airshow favourite, not to mention the fastest plane in the country. (and the only ejection seat too, military or civilian!!)

The Hunter is supersonic in a shallow dive, and when she makes a fast pass, she creates a distinctive *blue note* that can only mean a Hawker Hunter.

Click here for the sound of a fast airshow pass by this Hunter. (will open a new window)

From time to time I get to help prepare the plane for flight, and help with engine starts, usually holding the fire extinguisher. I suppose I'm a self-appointed crew member really, and although I don't own any part of her, I still call her *My Hunter*.

I've been very lucky in life, in many ways - imagine my luck as an ageing civilian, to get to play with jets!!!