Downtown Auckland


Flying over Auckland Harbour with the CBD and Sky Tower in the background. It's so unusual nowadays to be able to fly anywhere near this close to the centre of such a major city, you certainly couldn't do it in the UK. It's a quite a complicated flight to plan and fly because of all the controlled airspace around Auckland International airport, but it's definately worth it for the views.

Is that Spring in the air ????????

The weather has been fairly decent over the last couple of weeks which has allowed me to get quite a few flights done. The good news is that I have finally started my Nav flights and I'm now only 10 flights away from the dreaded PPL skills test, arghhhhhhhhhh. Before the skills test I have to do my Commercial Pilots Licence (CPL) Qualifier, a 400 mile solo X-country flight that involves two land aways and takes the best part of a day to complete (5 hours of flight time). If the weather holds out then I should get scheduled for my Qualifier some time next week, should be fun/terrifying. Class 1 Medical renewal up in Auckland tomorrow, should pass that without any problems, touch wood!

The photos below are of mine and Al's flight last week to Tauranga on the east coast and back to Hamilton via Rotorua, enjoy.


A lovely old DC3 pays a visit to Hamilton

Tracking east towards Tauranga and crossing the Kamai mountain range at 4500 ft. An engine failure over terrain like this would be very very bad news indeed.

Mt. Maunganui at Tauranga. This is a really great airport and one that I will certainly be visiting a lot when I get my NZ PPL. The runway is off to the right and circuit pattern takes you out over the Pacific Ocean, great fun. Beyond Mt. Maunganui you can see the 'White Island', NZ's only active marine volcano named by Captain Cook in 1769. Here endeth today's History lesson.

Approaching Rotorua airport, overhead Lake Rotorua with Mt. Ruapehu in the distance. Rotorua is a hotbed of volcanic activity and as a result the whole place stinks of rotten eggs, you can even smell it when your flying around at 2000ft.

Dam that is one big ass lake! Seriously though, the lakes in this country are massive, Lake Rotorua covers an area of approximately 80 square kilometres. Rotorua is small fry compared to Lake Taupo though, it has a surface area of 616 square kilometres. Here endeth today's geography lesson.

Tracking west back towards Hamilton above the cloud layer at 5000ft, awesome.

My Office




Cockpit of the newest Robin 2160 in the the CTC fleet, ZK - FXY. Believe it or not I do actually know what all those buttons do.

Mt. Ruhapehu Ski Trip


Me at the top of Mt. Ruapehu, 9000 ft above mean sea level, the view was breathtaking,

Me, Rod and Penger enjoying the perfect skiing conditions. The whole day, including the lift pass and equipment hire only cost 45 pounds, bargain! It was worth every penny as well, by far one of the best days I have in NZ to date.

Mt. Ngauruhoe (Mount Doom)

Hey good lookin !

After weighing up the pros and cons of skiing on an active volcano that could erupt at any time, we decided that a day trip to Mt. Ruapehu had been long overdue. It's a 3 hour drive to the ski resort which meant a very early start and the early indications suggested that Penger may still be drunk?

Clearways, our long awaited new accomodation


After 9 long weeks of living like refugees in Dey Street our new accomodation is finally ready, woh hoh.

Our kitchen at Dey Street was tiny and consisted of 2 microwaves and 2 electric frying pans to share between 24 of us, we didn't even have an oven. On our first night in Clearways we cooked an awesome roast dinner, my compliments to the chefs, Will Coldwell and Rich Fuller.

My room, including my Lemon tree.

The locals don't appear to be to friendly. Left to right we have Wee Pete, Simon and Penger saying hello.

The living room

Fancy dress night at Peachgrove


To celebrate Suneil's last weekend in NZ we decided a fancy dress party was in order. The theme of the party was 'S' so Penger and I decided to go as 'Suneils' long lost brothers, Sanjay and Akhmed. A slightly controversial choice of fancy dress but Suneil loved it, and yes, that is brown boot polish on our faces.

From left to right we have Me, Rod, Steph and Penger

Everyone went all out on the fancy dress and some of the costumes were brilliant

From left to right we have Damo, Al, Sean, Gary and Tony. Gary's Nazi SS costume and Hitler tash didn't go down to well with locals when we headed into town.

Guy, Rod and Steph in the Bank bar in Hamilton, classic photo.

X-Country with Damien


My theme of flying with crazy Irishman continues as I finally manged to pluck up enough courage to go flying with Damo. This photo is of us on short finals for runway 36 at Hamilton.

Looking northeast towards Thames and the Bay of Plenty.

Ohhhh Clouds

Hmmmm, time to bug out and call it a day as the weather closes in on us. Strictly speaking we're not actually meant to fly the Katana through weather like this as the prop is made of wood and could theoretically start to disintegrate if we encountered hail. What a crap aircraft, give me a Robin any day.

There's no Bagginses 'round here! They're up in Hobbinton...




This photo is for all you Lord of the Rings fans. That's Hobbiton down there, not the best of photo's I know but you can still make out all the Hobbit holes tucked into the side of the valley. It's only a 5 minute flight to the east of Hamilton airport, well hidden in the rolling country side to the southwest of Matamata.

Inside CTC....


Wee Peter Kerr, CP36's very own Glaswegian crack addict, how he got through selection I will never know. In this photo Peter is demonstrating how we spend 99.9% of our time, sitting in front of a poxy computer screen revising for our Air Transport Pilot Licence (ATPL's) exams.

The Maori call NZ, "Aotearoa", which means "Land of the Long White Cloud". However, it seems that something may have been lost in translation. Guy Adams (CP34) has reliably informed that the true meaning is - "Land of the continuous shitty fog and pissing down rain".

CTC have finally agreed to employ illegal immigrants to de-ice the aircraft for us. I believe this one is called Damien, rumour has it that CTC caught him rummaging around in their bins looking for potatoes and lucky charms.

Another flight canned due to crap weather, time to hit the books again.

The crew room

I love this photo. It really captures the look of shear terror on Coldwell's (middle) face prior to our aircraft type rating exam.

X-Country with Floody


Your Captain for today's flight will be a crazy Irishman with the mental age of a 10 year old (aka Simon Flood, a very good friend of mine from Uni)


The Waikato River

Mt. Ruapehu, New Zealand's largest ski resort. It's also an active volcanic and last erupted in 1996. The smaller mountain to the left of Ruapehu is Mt. Ngauruhoe, also an active volcanic and used as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.

Another mountain, this one is Mt. Taranaki on the east coast of the North Island. Floody and I were flying over 120 km's from it when I took this photo, gives you some idea of how big it is.

Ireland vs. All Blacks


What a great rugby match and what an awesome night out.

Ahhhh the token Irishman. Damien certainly enjoyed himself and we had some great banter with the locals. For the most part it was friendly but we did detect a hint of hostility when we started singing God Save the Queen after the Haka, oops.

Arghhhhhhhhh Dey Street


Will, myself and Penger slumming it in Dey Street

After our weekend of prayers, blessings and a host of other religous crap at the Christian camp, CTC moved us to our new accomodation back in Hamilton. I really can't describe what a complete shit hole this place was and CTC let us 'rot' there for over 9 weeks.

Peachgrove Burns


After months of trying we finally manged to piss-off the locals enough that they tried to burn us out, fair play. That's my room on the far right of this photo.

After the excitement of the fire we all decamped to the airport for a few well deserved beers and a bit of shut eye (10 points if you can spot me). From here we ended up being housed in a Christian camp for the weekend whilst CTC found us somewhere more permanent to live. It's fair to say that the fire hit everyone pretty hard but the fact that alcohol was forbidden at the Christian camp was without a doubt the hardest part of the whole ordeal.

Will re-enacts our heroic fire fighting attempt.

Nuff sed.

The lads !!!



Me, Suneil and 'Driving Miss Coldwell' (aka Will) out on the beers during our first week in Hamilton.

CTC Training Centre, Hamilton, New Zealand


My ride, yes I know it doesn't look like much but it's actually a very nice piece of kit. For those of you who care it's a Robin 2160, a fully aerobatic two seat training aircraft that cruises at about 135 mph.

After I have completed my sinlge engine training on the Robin I move onto the DA42 Twinstar (above) for the multi- engine phase of my training. Now this really is a serious piece of kit, the most advanced twin of its kind money can buy. It's scary to think that if all goes well for me the next aircraft I will fly after the Twinstar will be a 50 million pound Boeing or Airbus with 170 plus passengers in the back.

Early morning de-icing on the ramp at Hamilton, one of the joys of an 0830 flight in the winter in NZ. If you ask me (and most people don't) us pilots shouldn't have do this kind of crap and I have forwarded the idea of employing some illegal immigrants to do it for us. Still waiting for CTC to get back to me about that one.

Wow, I should be a photographer. Sunrise over the CTC ramp at Hamilton.

First day at School. Me and the rest of the guys I flew out with during our 'Cadet Induction Day', well it was more like 4 days and is more commonly known as 'death by Powerpoint'. From left to right we have Damien, Guy, Al and Tony (CP34), Steve, Me, Penger, Stefano, Jordan, Rich and Coldwell (CP36).