And as a bonus, here are photos of Brendan Deere’s Biggin Hill hangar.  This is located on base at Ohakea, and I was lucky enough to be given a tour the night before with a group of aviation enthusiasts.  Was well worth going along as we got up close and personal with a number of classic aircraft.  In the hangar was ZK-SPI, the single seat Spitfire, a survivor of four different air forces!  Next to it was the Avenger, which looked HUGE up close.  Then there was a Winjeel that Guy Stevenson has flown down in for the show, and next to that a 70 year old, never-ground-looped Harvard.

We spent a couple of hours in the hangar, Brendan was hugely accommodating to let us through the night before a huge airshow.  We were warned to be careful as the aircraft had been signed out and readied for the show, and there would be no way to do fabric repairs that night.  Fair enough!

Thanks again to Brendan and Dave from the forum for letting me through, and here are some photos

Tags: biggin hill | Ohakea | vh-tbm | ZK-ENA | ZK-SPI

And now we come to my favourite part of the show, the Aussie F18s.  Awesome doesn’t even begin to describe these guys.  Hugely loud, hugely fast, and hugely well flown.  I missed the solo display, but the 4 ship display was nuts.  Tighter than a tight thing, they did amazing vertical climbs, a very nice formation display, then flew over the crowd at 200ft or so with afterburners lit, which was insanely loud.  The sort of volume where your ears just give up and it feels like you’ve just stuck your head next to a speaker at a rock concert. I think most of the crowd involuntarily ducked when they went over, the sound was just so damn loud!   I want more!!!

In the first photo you can see the guy who flew over my section of the crowd, and you can clearly see the afterburners going.  Tee hee

Tags: F/A18 | RAAF

I love the Iroquois.  I really do.  I might be a fixed wing kind of guy, but I just love the noise of these old beasts.  Such a shame the Air Force is getting newer machines.  End of an era.  The Sioux and Seasprite also displayed, and we ended up with them all hovering in a line along the flight line, so steady it was like they were bolted to the sky. Amazing, and I felt a chill knowing I will never see this again.  Boo hoo!

The A109 came and did a fairly relaxed display, understandable as they haven’t been here long.  I missed the NH90 display but I understand it was even more cautious.  I understand.

Anyway, on with some helicopter pron

Tags: NZ3603 | NZ3706 | NZ3804 | Ohakea

The Orion looked just like it does every time I see it at a show, but the 757 had a nice 75th color scheme

Tags: nz4201 | NZ7571 | Ohakea

No, not a Hillman!  This is the Goodyear Avenger, VH-TBM, built by General Motors for the US Navy in 1945.  Very recently back from Australia, previously was here in NZ as ZK-TBM.  Awesome, huge aircraft, much bigger than you expect up close.

Tags: Ohakea | vh-tbm

A selection for you here, I only have a few photos of each, but can’t be buggered doing a separate blog post for each!  We had a nice Beaver at the show, ZK-AZB, in Fieldair markings, with a hopper still in the back!  There was the usual Vampire, ZK-RVM, doing it’s usual FAST display, and a pair of DC-3′s!  ZK-AMY and ZK-DAK. The Hunter also beat the show up nicely with fog streaming off both wings and canopy.  Awesome!

Tags: Ohakea | ZK-AMY | ZK-AZB | ZK-DAK | ZK-JIL | ZK-RVM

There were two Spitfires at the airshow, the two seater I believe is ZK-WDQ, and the single seater from Brendan Deere’s collection, ZK-SPI.  The two seater flew and did a marvelous display, again too fast to catch with my camera, so here is a couple of blurry photos for you.  ZK-SPI took off, but due to “issues” with the scheduling, it’s display was canned before it had time to even do a fast pass.  Humph.  Oh well, at least we had one Spit up, eh.

Tags: Ohakea | ZK-SPI | ZK-WDQ

I was pleased to see a number of vintage aircraft flying round.  We had the WW1 aircraft with a mock dogfight (we won, thankfully).  There were the usual Corsair and P-51, plus the Historic flight Harvard that is something like 70 years old and still doing air shows.  Awesome!

I didn’t get any photos of the P-51 and Corsair in the air, they were just too damn fast, so here are a couple on the ground for you, plus the WW1 dogfight

Tags: Brisfit | Fokker | NZ1015 | Ohakea | ZK-COR | ZK-TAF

Unlike Rodney, I mostly stayed on the flightline, which means I don’t have as much variety, but I did try and wander around before the show and snap some of the stuff on the ground

Tags: CASA CN-235 | NZ6257 | Ohakea | RAAF A30-004 | RSAF C-130 | USAF 05-5147

I’m here with the promised Ohakea report.  Rodney has already posted an excellent series of articles here, so I’m not going to try to duplicate his efforts.  I will post a short series of photos I took though.

First though, the trip down.  We couldn’t get a slot to fly in so we drove down to Wanganui as per the original plan, and stayed the night as we had planned to do.  We decided to leave at 7am the next morning, which turned out to be a good idea, as an enormous traffic jam of epic proportions built up shortly after we arrived.

We stayed for most of the day and decided to leave mid afternoon, so I have snaps of most of the aircraft which I will post shortly

Tags: Ohakea