ZK-ARJ

From the Convair stable, the CV-240 begat the CV-340 begat the CV-580 which you see here. The original design having heaved into the air in 1947. Although production ceased by 1956, these aircraft – in all their variants – can still be found hauling freight and, in this case, passengers on non-prime routes.

Unfortunately in New Zealand, a couple of this type have come to an untimely end on freight runs. One off the end of Auckland airport on takeoff in 1989 (3 dead) and another mid-flight near Kapiti Island in 2003 (2 dead) in stormy weather.

I’m not sure you’d get me on one of those things!

Taken about a month ago, this Canadair 600 arrived in Wellington and the two passengers were met by a Helipro Twin Squirrel which flew them off somewhere. It departed in a general NNW direction so my guess is to the Wairarapa. The jet belongs to a record label, Skye Gryphon, of Concord, New Hampshire. Check the photo stream for more pics.

Following on from the massive 533 photo Classic Fighters 2007 set, however preceding that on the calendar, is a set from the biennial Warbirds Over Wairarapa 2007 airshow at Masterton’s Hood Aerodrome. Weighing in at a ‘mere’ 180 photos, it has some of the same aircraft but with the added bonus of some serious jets.

One of the interesting aspects of putting photos on Flickr is you get a lot of folks looking at your photos and sometimes you get invited to place your photos in ‘pools’.  Pools are set up by any Flickr member with some sort of topic and photos are invited for submission, sometimes with rules, sometimes not.

One such pool I have been invited to is the De Havilland pool.  At the time of writing, there are 2,624 photos in the pool from 348 members and yours truly is the second most prolific contributor!  The pool accepts pics of aircraft from all the De Havilland design nations – UK, Canada and Australia.

I’ve not seen many ‘I’ registration helicopters. I clearly remember ‘IZZ’ at Ardmore, and a brand new Eurocopter there too, but here is, I believe, the first one I’ve seen in Wellington.

ZK-IAV is an AS-355 “Twin Squirrel” operated by AV8 Helicopters. This is the machine, this photo (and some others) that sparked this blog idea as it was also captured by Rodney of Rodney’s Aviation Ramblings.

OK, so here’s the first photo post. This is the “title shot” for my Classic Fighters 2007 set on Flickr. Click on the photo to go to its Flickr page, or on the link to go to the set.