B1900C and C90

It's the first day of my holiday and so I spent most of the day at the Aero Club. Two photos from today were this Vincent Aviation Beech 1900C, ZK-VAE, and an Air Wanganui Beech King Air C90, ZK-MKG. I'm not sure what the 1900C was doing, but the C90 was here on an aero-medical flight.

I also got a photo of the moon this afternoon - click on it for a much bigger version.

Mainland Air Piper Chieftain

Today's weather has been pretty rough and has been forecast to get worse, with up to 60 knot northerlies due to arrive this evening. Needless to day, there was not much in the way of GA flying happening today.

The only aircraft that did pop in to the aero club was a Mainland Air Piper PA31-350 Chieftain. ZK-KVW came up on an air ambulance flight from its base at Dunedin airport. Here are a couple of photos of the aircraft while it was parked up for refueling.

CTC Diamond DA42 Twinstar

There was nothing much happening at Wellington today [apart form the usual that is], although a CTC Diamond DA42 Twinstar, ZK-CTJ turned up with a couple of additional pilots on board to pick up their Piper PA44 Seminole, ZK-MBV, which has been stuck at Wellington outside the aero club for a good week or so.

Here are two pictures of the Twinstar - one parked up and one after liftoff.

Easy label searching added

This is just a quick note to say that I have change the information on the right hand panel of this site. I've added a number of quick label search categories below the Blog Roll of Honour:

• Manufacturer
• Aircraft Model
• Event
• Organisation
• Aerodrome
• Aircraft rego

Mostly these detail where the label occurs 3 or more times in the site, although some of the smaller categories are 2 or more occurrences.

Remember that you can also do a text search across the entire site using the search box at the top left of the page.

Enjoy!

Rodney's World Travels and Other Grandiose Stuff!

I've been thinking for a while now that it is about time I introduced an additional blog, one that is not focused on aviation, but more on the other stuff that happens from time to time.

To that end, I am pleased to announce the arrival of Rodney's World Travels and Other Grandiose Stuff! Not an aeroplane in sight [sorry!], but the intention is to include other sights from around New Zealand and, from time to time, the world.

In short, from time to time, I hope to practice my amateur photography away from the delights of the airfield. I especially want to include pictures of my upcoming trip to England, Slovenia and Austria in September, and we'll see where it goes from there.



Just to avoid any doubt... Rodney's Aviation Ramblings continues to live and will continue to be my main blog, so there won't be any reduction in content here!

It'll take another couple of weeks to get up and running properly, but for now I'd suggest that you take a quick visit, set up your RSS feed and wait for the content to roll on in :-) - then come back here and continue to enjoy the sights and sounds of aviation in New Zealand!



One last thing for my non-New Zealand readers... the images in this post, and many of the images in RWTAOGS come from Wellington - This is my aviation playground - surely it just doesn't get any more beautiful than this!

Spit Roast and Quiz Night 2009

After the excitement of a trip to Omaka and various other "stuff" that occured on Saturday, what better way to finish of the day with the Wellington Aero Club's annual Spit Roast and Quiz Night!

The food was delicious [as always], and the quiz was a load of fun also. There was only one aviation section which involved providing the name of the airline to match the tail logo. Needless to say we did quite well at that section - unfortunately so did everyone else :-)

I'm pleased to say that Bronnies Team [named after the person who protested last when we were deciding the team name] did not come last - in fact we came TOP [of the bottom three]. Darn! :-)

The night wasn't a total waste however, since the All Blacks beat the Wallabies 19-18 [Rugby Union for the uninitiated] - I look forward to seeing photos of the Prime Minister of Australia [Kevin Rudd] wearing an All Black tie on Monday as "punishment" for his national team losing the game :-)

Omaka for lunch: Aug 2009: #3

The final part of any trip is the return home [I have a knack for stating the obvious!]. After snapping pictures of the aircraft around us, and Pete having a quick look at the Nanchang that we happened to park up next to, we headed off.

The flight back was just as scenic and calm as the trip over. What follows is one shot as we departed [showing the Bristol Freighter parked up next to some hangers and the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre], one on approach to Wellington and the final one is looking back down the runway as we exited on the western apron where the Wellington Aero Club is located.

All-in-all, a really nice way to spend a couple of hours!

Omaka for lunch: Aug 2009: #2

After a quick bite to eat at the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre, we headed back to our aircraft for the flight back to Wellington. Before taking off, I snapped photos of a few of the aircraft that happenned to be there - mostly visitors in this case.

Here they are, top to bottom:

Piper PA28-180, ZK-DFL, registered to Kapiti Aero Club
Cessna 172N, ZK-KAS, also of Kapiti Aero Club
Hughes 369HS, ZK-HER, of Cloudy Bay Helicopters
Nanchang CJ6, ZK-JQS, of Omaka Real Flying Club
Falconar F-12, ZK-DBI, registered at a Rolleston based syndicate
General picture of the flightline back towards the Marlborough Aero Club hanger and clubrooms, including Piper PA38-112, ZK-EIY, registered to a Blenheim based owner

Omaka for lunch: Aug 2009: #1

Lazing around at the Aero Club on Saturday, and waiting for the Club's annual spit roast and quiz evening [more on this later], I was invited to go to Omaka aerodrome for lunch! Not being one to often sit on the ground if the other option is to sit in a plane, I said yes and off we went.

For those that follow this blog, Omaka is the home of the awesome Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre that contains a range of original aircraft along with flying reproductions [not mere replicas!] and memorabilia - including the cross out of Manfred von Richthofen's aircraft [apparently souvenired by some Australian troops after he crashed and died]!! I'll always recommend a visit for anyone who is interested in aviation - it is well worth while!

As you'll see from the photos on the trip over there, the weather was fantastic, and we enjoyed the trip very much. Many thanks to Brian for taking Pete and myself over!

The photos below included a picture of Woodbourne aerodrome, then Omaka [Omaka is contained within the Woodbourne control zone], and Piper PA28R-201 Arrow, ZK-EIF - the aircraft for our flight, and finally, ZK-EIF's instrument panel on-route.

CTC visitors

On Saturday I saw these two visitors to Wellington from CTC in Hamilton - first a Piper PA-44-180 Seminole, ZK-MBV and secondly a Cessna C172S, ZK-JMG.

The Seminole is still parked up [as on Sunday] outside the aero club due to a problem with one engine [can't recall, but it might be a starter???]. The C172 departed on Saturday afternoon.

Pictures are three views of the Piper and one of the Cessna.

United Breaks Guitars: Song 2

Following on from my previous post, a link to Dave Carroll's song United Breaks Guitars, here's the promised Song 2.

As a quick reminder, Dave Carroll is a muso whose guitar was damaged by baggage handlers working for United Airlines. When United refused to take responsibility, Dave Carroll took "revenge" by writing a song. This is the second song - I'm not sure if there will be a third.

Anyway, this song has quite a different feel from the first, a little more "bubbly" [that's a technical word :-)]. Enjoy the music video!

A few circuits

After yesterday's BFR, I decided to go up for a few circuits. Although it may be hard for some students to understand :-), I find a few circuits is actually quite an enjoyable exercise..!

The aircraft was ZK-TDJ [Piper PA28-181 Archer], and I managed to get it all done before the weather went bad. Speaking of the weather, it seems to have been better than forecast for the past few days; at least until late afternoon today.

I'm not sure if I'll be flying myself around much in the next 6 - 8 weeks - there's a big overseas holiday coming up, but I'll try and get some photos of aircraft as I trip around :-)

A big "Thankyou" to all of you who have come to visit over the past few years! Thanks to your support, this blog seems to get busier and busier - just the other day, visitor counts for 2009 surpassed the total for the entire 2008 calender year!

The only other news would be a big "Congrats" to a certain aero club instructor who earned his B-Cat instructor rating today. Well done Karl!

RNZAF Boeing B757

A visitor that I haven't seen for a while is a Royal New Zealand Air Force [RNZAF] Boeing B757. This one [NZ7572] arrived this afternoon, and had not left by 6:15pm when I left.

CTC Diamond DA 42

In addition to my BFR [see post], there were a few other interesting visitors. One of these was a CTC Aviation Diamond DA 42 Twinstar, ZK-CTO which parked up at the aero club for refueling and to check the weather. This aircraft was returning to Hamilton from a trip down to Christchurch.

According to some, the second engine is very necessary as they tend to fail regularly :-(. Not sure if that's true, but it's a good story...!

BFR completed today

I managed to complete my BFR [Biennial Flight Review] today - a bit of a surprise since the weather was forecast to be less than ideal. As it turned out, it was a good day for it.

As usual I flew a Piper PA28-181 Archer, ZK-TDJ, pictured below, sitting in the aero club hanger later on in the day.

For your information...

After many hours, I've finally updated the entire blog [all 540 posts prior to this one] with post labels. The labels appear below each post, are clickable and search a quick and easy searches to the site information that most interests you!

For example, clicking on the labels at the bottom of this post provides searches to all admin posts, and as a test, to all posts referencing the mighty Convair aircraft.

There is also a label cloud on the right-hand-side of the page. This provides a quick reference to every post label that is referenced multiple times [at the time of writing, 6 or more times] on the site. You can instantly look up the most popular posts by airline names, aircraft types and names, and in some cases, aircraft registrations!

Don't forget you can also do a free-text search over the entire site using the search box at the very top-left of the page.

Enjoy!

More Wellington shots on the new camera

It's been another awesome weather day at Wellington today [I wonder how long this will last??!]. No flying for me today, but I did get to take a few photos - mainly just practicing with the new camera. As I mentioned last time, there's a lot to learn, but I'm learning a lot.

With good weather, the aero club was busy with the trainer aircraft busy most of the day, along with the Nanchang and a number of other flights. Ok, now to the pictures. Top to bottom are:

Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, ZK-MYH, registered to Air2There.com
DHC-8, ZK-NEZ, registered to Air Nelson [part of the Air NZ group]
Nanchang CJ6, ZK-JNA, registered to Wellington Aero Club
Beech BE77 Skipper, ZK-ESC, registered to Wellington Flight Training
Cessna 421C, ZK-MFT, registered to Skyline Aviation of Hastings * see below
Cessna 172N, ZK-ETK, registered to Mainland Air Services



* I've photographed ZK-MFT before, albeit with a completely different paint scheme. Click here to search for this aircraft.

No BFR today...

Wouldn't you believe it! The best weather we've had in ages, my BFR is due, and the aircraft goes u/s! Doh!

The other PA28 I could have used is out of town, so here's hoping for better weather and an aircraft next weekend :-)

New camera, new photos

Well, I finally did the deed and went out and purchased a new camera. Yippee!

While guaranteed to have some people scratching their heads ["Why didn't he get something better/ bigger/ smaller/ whatever?"], the purchase was always going to be the best compromise of functionality, quality and money, and I think that I've done OK.

What I've got is a Canon EOS 450D [or click here for quick specs], twin lens kit with 18-55 IS and 55-250 IS lenses. The shop was doing a reasonable deal including a 4Gb SDHC card, camera bag and a couple of other goodies thrown in for free.

I've spent the last couple of days playing with it. The first thing I have learnt is that I have a lot to learn [!!], although even in the past few days I've become accustomed to some of the basic functions.

Today was the first day to have a decent play while pointing the camera at aircraft. I'm very happy with some of the results, although clearly I need to get a bit more comfortable with the general handling and stuff.

Anyway, on to some pictures. Here are eight of the better pictures taken today. These have been severely reduced [they expand to 19% of original size if you click on them]. Top to bottom are:

2 x Air New Zealand, Boeing B737, ZK-NGM
Cessna 172RG, ZK-NPM, registered to a New Plymouth address
Nanchang CJ6, ZK-JNA, registered to Wellington Aero Club
Piper PA28R-201, ZK-EIF, Registered to Wellington Aero Club
3 x Jetstar, Airbus A320, VH-VQD