Some visitors to the airport...

Here we have a PAC 750XL, ZK-JDQ, which has been purchased by a company in Berlin to do meat-bomb dropping. Two of them are out here getting NZ licenses and XL ratings and they will be flying it back to Berlin. I forget if they said 12 or 14 legs to get it home. That's dedication!!!!

Also we have an Air NZ Dash 8 I snapped while testing my new (old) lens out... Looks nice in the evening sun.

Waikato Microlight Club Open Day

One of the two local microlight clubs which has a lovely *long* airstrip and hangar very very close to the city had it's open day yesterday. There were dozens of microlights, helicopters and light sport aircraft, things like Zeniths and Aerosports, the latter being a very sexy machine I didn't get a photo of :-(
A lot of the machines were giving rides, I missed out on a ride in my chosen machine because I'm too tall apparently, but the rest of them were coming and going nonstop, and most of them beating up the strip after takeoff. Cool!

Phil Hooker turned up as well, with his Bell 47 and one of his C152's, in which he did an awesome display that had the crowd gasping at times - he went up a few thousand feet and did an aerobatic display complete with loops, rolls, stall turns, etc, and as he did so he got lower and lower until he was at 500 ft or so, and proceeded to fly down the strip just about sideways - cool stuff! He then climbed to the circuit (500ft) and did his circuit and landed with the engine completely stopped. He then had to restart in order to taxi back :)

Good stuff, I'll be going back next year for sure.

More from Ohakea

Some slides I shot at Ohakea, just got them back today, these are the good ones

A few more photos from SportAvex 2008

Here's a medley of photos for you from SportAvex 2008 at Tauranga. These are some that I took on slide film which I was very slack and hung on to until last week. Thought I'd post them anyway, but I got another 3 rolls to go through so they're not in any sort of order. Hope you enjoy them anyway.

2 more F-111 pics

Looking through my 700 remaining photos from Ohakea, I picked out a couple more F-111 pics for you all...

Woe upon me for using Epson scanner software :-)

One thing I have found as I'm learning about scanning negatives is how badly my scanner does some films. I've just rescanned one of the frames I previously posted, thought I should put the new version up. Well, it's not quite the same frame but close - I like this a whole lot more. Sorry for the stuffup folks, such is life...

Ohakea: F-111

And now we have the grand finale - the awesome, mind bendingly loud F-111 from the RAAF. This has to be the loudest aeroplane I've ever heard, I'm very impressed!!



In F-111 language, a fast pass = 980 kph!



Nice and clean under the fuse...



Inverted pass - nice!



We thought he was just going round, but then...



Dump and burn, baby!