JUST FLIGHT HS-748 released , new kid on the block ..

[Ian Warren]

JUST FLIGHT Hawker Siddeley HS-748 released this morning.
www.justflight.com/product/hs-748-propliner

[Dave Homewood]

Someone needs to simulate Shorty on the flightline.

[Ian Warren]

Give one a good time line, Alistair McLeod shared these photo's with me eleven years back, old Christchurch International Airport in 1968 .. Simply a Gorgeous photo, the stories 'Al' told me, simply amazing what they did with the 748 in the Mount Cook airlines livery, see that kid close to the control tower, that was me .... Naaaaaaah! .. the other of course in Mount Cook itself




I'm very sure Alistair will be very pleased the photo's those, his now nearly 50 years ago are out there for people to really enjoy.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

I particularly love that third photograph from the days when Mount Cook Airlines used to takeoff from Christchurch Airport and fly due west (literally true west) until abeam the Tasman Saddle (not far ahead from where the aircraft is in that third picture), then turn to port and cross the saddle and descend down the Tasman Glacier valley to Mount Cook Airport.

In about March or April 1996, a small party of us were spending a few days in Aoraki-Mount Cook National Park prior to heading to Warbirds Over Wanaka and early in the morning we were way up the ridge from the old Ball Hut, well above Caroline Hut heading for Ball Pass when the early morning flight from Christchurch descended down the valley a couple of thousand feet below us. There was a thin layer of cloud in the lower valley, and as the 748 flew past and below us, it punched through that layer of cloud and disappeared from sight, although in the still morning air, we could hear it all the way down to the landing at Mount Cook Airport.

I flew in one of Mount Cook's DC-3 airliners once (ZK-BEU), in their 748s three times, and have since flown in the ATRs several times, although by the time they came along, Mount Cook Airlines was well and truly swallowed up by Air New Zealand.

[Ian Warren]

I got to fly out off Wanaka in the jump seat on a 'Pionair' DC-3 to return to Wigram, I never got the chance to fly on a HS 748 tho got to really check it out in around 1996 with the Aeronautical Society, found a mate Andrew working on the nose gears ... the aircraft now is in Canada, the things one remember and the stories, Alistair really had some great tales, from the RNZAF to Mount Cook Airlines and his adventures there.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

BTW, those four photographs....the first one (as correctly stated) is at Christchurch.

However the second photograph is at Frankton (Queenstown Airport). The mountain range in the background is The Remarkables.

The third photograph is, as I already mentioned in a post, almost over the top of the Tasman Saddle (that's Aoraki-Mount Cook and Mount Tasman you can see in the centre of the Captain's windscreen, with the little bump between them being Mount Dampier, NZ's third-highest mountain), and the fourth photograph is on the ground at Mount Cook Airport.

[Ian Warren]

I guess when the 748 first arrived at Queenstown, the town would have been buzzing, something so new like that in 1968