Rangiora

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Norma gave us contact information for a customer of theirs that happens to live in NZ. We thought that since we would be passing right by them, we’d give them a call. They’re great people and were eager to drop everything to meet. 

They had us over for lunch on Friday. That ended up including a ride out to the airport to hang out at the hangar, and have a look at their “180”. It’s actually a converted 182, but that’s ok. It’s like a Baptist converting to a Catholic; unless you know what to look for, you can’t hardly tell the difference. That stretched into dinner, and ended up with us leaving at about 9:30 pm with an offer of a plane ride the next morning.

We hit it off immediately. Malcolm and Daphne are big Skywagon people, and hang out with the same. There are tons of back country strips here, and they have as many pictures of their camping trips as we do. The only thing that’s different is you can’t just take off and end up at some out of the way strip. These are all private here, and you have to call up the land owner to get permission first.

It turns out that the main reason that we were invited to fly was so we could fly over the sheep station that we were planning to book into for a few days of fishing. He knew the station, and knew that it wasn’t anything like we described (all based on info from their web site), but was too polite to say so. He guessed we would find that out ourselves when we flew over, and save us a three hour drive. He was right.

Malcolm is retired from the airlines but used to fly Skywagons that had been converted into crop dusters (it’s called top dressing here) in the “early days”. He also flew Skywagons on floats for tourists before the great helicopter invasion. He told me that there are a lot of areas in the wilderness that the DOC give operators permits to use based on so many allowable landings a season. The choppers cheat; they hover 6” off the ground and drop off their “meat” and don’t count it as a landing.