SPLASHDOWN: ADVENTURES OF A NEW ZEALAND SEAPLANE PILOT

By Russell Smith

This book tells of a young couple who struggled against the odds to introduce a seaplane service to New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds, and to members of the travelling public between the South and North Islands.
Locals looked askance at what was a totally new concept to the area, but the aeroplanes soon became accepted, especially after their lifesaving use in emergencies was recognised by people in the far-flung reaches of the outer Sounds.
Russell Smith, owner and pilot, writes of years of incredible happenings, some adventurous, many humorous, and some just plain harrowing. One account bordering on surreal, occurred at a boat ramp where he was surrounded by nine policemen, accused of being a UFO from outer space! Unbelievable, but true, as is the whole book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Aug 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369493090

Russell Smith

Russell Smith, born in South Africa and raised in Halifax, is a writer of wide acclaim. His debut novel, How Insensitive, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Both his short story collection, Young Men, and his novel Muriella Pent were shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award. He is also the author of Noise; The Princess and the Whiskheads (a fable); Diana: A Diary in the Second Person; and the style guide Men’s Style. Smith works regularly with the CBC and The Globe and Mail.

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Copyright © 2023 by Russell Smith.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover design by Gympie Graphics and photo of aircraft - Ross Ewing.

Rev. date: 08/26/2023

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgement

Introduction

Chapter 1 Beginning Aviation

Chapter 2 Establishing A Float-Plane Company

Chapter 3 Under Way With Float-Air

Chapter 4 Float-Air Surprises

Chapter 5 The New Cessna Arrives

Chapter 6 Halcyon Days Of Float-Air

Chapter 7 Cook Strait Weather

Chapter 8 People And Animals

Chapter 9 People And Happenings

Chapter 10 Aiming To Satisfy

Chapter 11 Coping With Emergencies

Chapter 12 More Emergencies

Chapter 13 Training Web-Foot Pilots

Chapter 14 Float-Air Into The Eighties

Chapter 15 Wires

Chapter 16 Final Days Of Float-Air

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Many thanks go to my wife, Pat, for her hours of proof-reading and for her most capable editing of Splashdown. With her expertise, and apart from my determined use of poetic licence in some cases, very little grammar and punctuation suffered in the making of this book.

INTRODUCTION

The time had come.

We were about to deliberately STALL our aeroplane.

Four thousand feet below, two or three small tributaries of the Wairau River snaked between steep ridges of tussock and rock, that wandered their way down to the Wairau Plains of Marlborough in New Zealand’s South Island.

I looked down, wondering how far the landscape was going to rise to meet us, once the aeroplane stopped flying and began to plummet earthwards. I had to admit to a small knot of insecurity that formed in my stomach, and my grip on the controls tightened involuntarily. The next minute or two would be interesting.

Allan, my flying instructor sat behind me in the rear seat of our small Piper Cub, while I sat right up front with a perfect view through the windshield and the whirling propeller blades, of distant hills under a cloudless blue sky. I held the control column in my right hand, my feet on the rudder pedals, and my left hand gripped the throttle lever – these were the very controls that had to be correctly manipulated during the coming exercise.

Close the throttle, said the voice from the back. Maintain level flight; notice the speed washing off. Keep wings level and stick coming back. Stick back, back more, right back! There she goes!

There she went alright! DOWN, and so suddenly that everything not tied down sailed up around our ears. The little Cub’s nose dropped sharply, and the view that filled the windscreen of Mother Earth from a vertical perspective was somewhat startling.

We survived!

So continued another small part of my preparation for a future in aviation. Allan had just introduced me to an occurrence that has claimed the lives of countless fliers. Stalling is an essential part of the syllabus for learning to fly aeroplanes, and after a few more exercises I became quite comfortable with the procedure for stall recovery.

Flying aeroplanes - even the sound of it gives a small rush of adrenalin. Little did I know at the time that there would be many future moments of larger adrenalin rushes.

So here is the story.

CHAPTER ONE

Beginning Aviation

No pilot EVER forgets his first solo.

I had been a member of the Marlborough Aero Club at Omaka aerodrome since early in 1968, learning to fly in a little green and white Piper Cub, registered ZK BTO. Allan Graham, the Chief Flying Instructor, a man similar in age to me, had been long-suffering in his months of tuition but had never appeared to lose his sense of humour. With his rugged good looks, he was every inch the perfectionist in all things aviation and was almost God-like to a beginner like me.

With seven hours of instruction entered in my logbook, I started a further lesson with Allan. As we came to a stop after the second circuit, Allan suddenly opened the door and got out, saying, I don’t want to fly with you anymore! While my mouth was still open in protest he said, O.K. Go and do a circuit on your own, and then come back to the club.

So this was it! My first solo! Taxiing back to the end of the airfield, I turned and lined up for take-off. For a second or two I sat there, going over my pre-take-off checks, and then, as I had done many times before, slowly and smoothly opened the throttle. The little Cub gathered speed, up came the tail, and before I knew it we were airborne.

Sixty-five knots, trim for climb, came Allan’s voice from the rear, except that Allan wasn’t there. Nobody was there. I was all on my own climbing through five hundred feet, on my way to a thousand, circuit height. I turned around to take an unaccustomed look at the empty back seat. Silly me, I thought, but it reinforced that I really was alone. Levelling at a thousand feet, I looked at the view. I sang a song. I waggled the wings, with nobody asking why. I think I may have even yahooed a little. It was all such a great feeling. But enough of the revelry. Time to descend again.

Looks like I’m still too high, I told myself, as the airfield got closer. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be able to land in the first third of the field as I had been trained to do, and a go-around was necessary, so throttle opened fully and another climb commenced. I realized that without the weight of the instructor the little Cub was now much lighter, and on my next attempt at landing I would have to compensate for the reduced weight.

Meanwhile, back in the clubhouse, Flora, my wife, who had supported me in my flying endeavours, had been watching the proceedings through the window. She asked Allan, who had just walked in from the field, what he had got me to do. He just has to make one circuit, and then come in to the clubhouse, said Allan.

Then why is he going round again without landing? asked Flora, just a little bit mystified.

Don’t worry, says Allan. If he’s not down by nightfall we’ll take up another aeroplane and shoot him down!

With a giggle, Flora turned to the window again, to watch as I made a better approach, and completed a landing at last. As I parked the Cub and walked into the clubhouse, it was handshakes and congratulations all round. I was now a fully-fledged Student Pilot. The date was March 25th, 1968.

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Completion of First Solo

More lessons followed, with Allan riding shotgun for the first circuit, and then sending me off to practice on my own, fine tuning my handling of the aircraft. Those hours spent alone at the controls were when I really felt that I was learning to fly. It was about that time that the Marlborough Aero Club invested in a fully aerobatic aircraft, the Victa Airtourer. Allan and other members of the club felt that by doing a course of aerobatics, pilots would become more skillful in their flying, being able to cope with anything that an aeroplane could do to you. After a few lessons in various manoeuvres in the Victa, I would go off and practise on my own. Those were great days - the sky was mine, and I would often think, I wonder if it would work if I tried …? But as often as not, it wouldn’t work, with the aeroplane doing its own thing and teaching me a lesson. I tried to tail-slide, which involves climbing vertically until the aeroplane comes to a stop, with its nose pointed at the sky. Theoretically, it should then start to slide backwards, tail first, but it was not an easy thing to do. The weight and rotation of the engine did funny things to the aircraft, and I usually found myself falling one-wing down and entering a spin.

Another thing I tried that scared me the first time it happened, was an upside-down stall, where at the top of a loop I decided to stay inverted while I looked at the scenery, craning my neck and holding the stick forward. The aircraft stalled suddenly, and as I fell, upside down, the scenery whirled in all directions. With very little guidance from me, the aeroplane found its own equilibrium, and I pulled out of the ensuing dive with my head spinning. After such episodes, I sometimes arrived back at the aero club, slightly unsteady on my feet. It was all great fun!

As flying hours increased to fifty, I continued ploughing my way through textbooks studying the required subjects for a Private Pilot’s licence which would enable me to go flying with passengers. Flora encouraged me in all my flying and my studies, and good sport that she was, spent many hours testing me and hearing my answers, so much so that she could probably have sat the exam successfully herself.

After sitting and passing the exam, the next step was to pass a flight test. Mr. Taffy Evans, flight testing officer, arrived from Wellington to test two candidates for the Private Pilot’s Licence. The other chap’s wife and Flora sat chewing their fingernails in the clubroom while we went out with Mr. Evans and did our stuff, the other chap in a Piper Cherokee and me in the Piper Cub. There were more congratulations as we completed our flights successfully, and with brief paperwork done, at long, long, last we each took our spouses for their first husband-piloted flights. Flora had been long-suffering in her encouragement, and finally she got to experience a flight that she thoroughly enjoyed.

Meanwhile, we continued with our farming, and as years went by I amassed quite a few hours in the air. We had many visits from our relatives, who often came large distances to stay with us. My parents and brother Nairn, from Dunedin, were all taken for an aerial ride. At first, my Mum was the only one who knew that I was learning to fly. With Nairn, it wasn’t until I took him out to Omaka for a pilot to take him for a fly for his birthday that he found out. And even then, it wasn’t until he was strapped in his seat, and I hopped into the pilot’s seat, started the engine and taxied out, that he realised I’d been keeping a secret. Ha ha, gotcha Nairn!

The time came when I completed the building of our boat, a sixteen-foot cabin cruiser. It had sat in the shed for quite a few years until we decided that it was high time to get it into action, so the following weekend we towed it the four miles to Picton and launched it at the boat ramp there. I took it for its initial test run, and sure enough, the big Dodge engine with the ten-inch prop powered the boat along at a great speed. Flora and the kids were keen to try, so with lifejackets on everybody, off we went. It was an exhilarating experience for the four children, and the start of a new introduction to the beautiful Marlborough Sounds. On many weekends, we boated around the bays and inlets of Queen Charlotte Sound, getting to know the area and loving what we saw.

I was given a book for my birthday called, A Shower of Spray, and We’re Away. It was the story of famous New Zealand aviator, Fred Ladd, and his life of flying amphibious aircraft, mainly in the Auckland region and around the Hauraki Gulf. It whetted my appetite, and I thought that water flying would be lots of fun.

A tiny spark formed in the back of my mind. I said to Flora, Suppose, just suppose someone came up with the idea of flying a seaplane in the Sounds. Do you think it would be a feasible idea? We knew that nobody was doing anything with seaplanes in the centre of the country. We wondered why not? Surely someone would soon decide to try. We would keep our ears open, and if by any chance an opportunity presented itself for us to involve ourselves in that sort of thing, we would look at it. But it was really a pie-in-the-sky idea to do anything as mind-boggling as starting a seaplane company.

Since I was aiming to achieve over 200 hours, as was required for a commercial licence, I thought that some of those hours might as well be accumulated by getting some water-flying experience. To do that, I travelled to Rotorua, where Floatplane Air Services ran two or three Cessna floatplanes around the thermal areas of the North Island.

Brian Brooker, the manager and major partner of the company, met me at the Rotorua Airport and whisked me into town, where the floatplane terminal nestled at the lakefront. Brian and his pilots made me very welcome, and I thought that here was a bunch of fun guys who would make my time in Rotorua very enjoyable. They certainly did their best to make our Happy Hour at the end of a day’s flying enjoyable, but my capacity in the drinking department showed me up as a dismal failure. I never did try to keep up. They were experts, as I fully acknowledged.

Rotorua is situated right in the middle of New Zealand’s active thermal area, and all the time, fissures open up just about anywhere that pressure builds up under the earth’s thin crust. It’s a very interesting town to visit. For the next few days, Brian’s tuition opened my eyes to a totally new kind of flying. We made an exciting landing in a river, at a place called Orakei Korako that is situated in a gorge, so the approach was made, descending between cliffs on either side. At various spots in these cliffs, clouds of steam issued from vents, with periodic explosions, amid underground rumblings and earth tremors. Local people seem to be quite inured to all the volcanic activity going on around them, but to me it seemed we’d just landed in Dante’s Inferno.

My stay in Rotorua lasted for four days, finishing my float endorsement with Brian. I thought, If this is what floatplane flying is all about, flying floats is for me!

The cows were all dried off towards the end of May, and I was able to really get stuck into the flying. It was during that winter that I did most of my night flying, much of that being at Christchurch, a beautiful city. It was like a fairyland at night, all lights and movement. Neon colours flashed their messages, and car lights glimmered like moving glow-worms amid the network web of streets far below. I wished that Flora could have enjoyed the scene, but I still needed night-flying hours logged to carry passengers.

After my first night flight with instructor Peter Maine, it was time to get some night hours on my own. Next night, off I flew alone in a Cherokee, with Peter’s warning, Keep a close eye on the outside temperature gauge. There’s mist around, and a drop of only a couple of degrees will see the whole lot develop into a blanket of fog, and you won’t be able to get down.

Christchurch was just as beautiful as ever from my height of fifteen hundred feet. Car lights flickered between patches of mist, and I recognized some of the main streets that I knew well. There was Cathedral Square, with all streets converging on its oasis of brilliant light, showing the hub of the city’s business activity. A large dark area showed the location of Hagley Park, where the River Avon wound its way through the city. This was a most pleasant way to spend a frosty Canterbury evening, but after half an hour, it was time to head back to the airport.

Steering towards the west I peered ahead to locate the airport amid the kaleidoscope of lights behind me and row upon row of streetlights below. Car lights moved along these rows in their hundreds, their headlights shining through patches of mist and fog, but I was unable to work out where any of the streets and highways led. I peered intently through the windshield, but I couldn’t see the airport either. To the west of my position over the city, all I could see were large areas of lights interspersed with large dark areas, any one of which could be Harewood Airport. Surely the airport would stand out, but try as I might, I couldn’t see where it was! Still, I had to be less than five miles away, so it was time to call the tower to say that I was inbound.

Thumbing my microphone, I radioed, Christchurch tower, this is CUX inbound from over the city, to which I received the reply, Cleared to join the circuit. But where was the circuit? It would be ridiculous to say that I was lost within four or five miles of the place. I kept going in the general direction. Ahead lay a large, dark area. Would that be where the airport was?

At last I spotted the white and green beacon blinking away on the control tower roof, and with great relief, swung into the circuit pattern, to line up with the rows of dim runway lights. Those lights were much dimmer than the streetlights I’d been following. No wonder I couldn’t see the airport, situated as it was in one of the dark areas, with only the airport beacon showing. As I touched down, patches of mist flicked past, and taxiing in I stopped outside the Aero Club office. Peter said, Yes, it can be quite difficult to see the airport at night. (Oh well, OK then.)

Still at Christchurch I met instructor Peter Perano, a slightly built chap with dark hair and complexion, sporting a black moustache which he described as A remnant of our last competition at moustache growing. It and I found ourselves quite attached to each other, so never got around to saying goodbye. A lad with a wry sense of humour was Peter. He was a good teacher too, in the low-flying exercises he took me for, around some of the foothills of the Southern Alps.

As well, little did we know that one day Peter and I were going to be partners in a new flying enterprise!

Many more weeks of study followed, some spent at the Nelson Aviation College under the tutelage of Walter Wagtendonk, who had never quite lost his Dutch accent and was a superb teacher. Wally’s class numbered ten for that period, all young pilots hoping to progress further towards aviation careers. One, Tim Wilson, boarded with me in Nelson, at the home of an old lady who cooked dinner for us at night. Tim looked every inch a hippie: sandy-haired and sporting an equally sandy-coloured beard. He wasn’t prone to taking life too seriously - what you’d call laid back, with a sense of humour that simmered just beneath the surface. And to complete the picture, he hailed from Sydney. What more could I say? An easy-going Aussie.

Five days each week we attended Wally’s classes, and since Tim would be at a loss for things to do at the weekends, I invited him to come home with me for the two days each week. I was needed on the farm where Flora and ten-year old Kathryn were coping with calving cows and milking, while thirteen-year-old Jennie cooked meals and looked after family affairs. My girls certainly helped me towards getting my qualifications, for which