Air show’s near tragedy

Wellington airport’s reputation as a hair-raising place to land has been highlighted in a short film about the near-calamitous air show for its opening 60 years ago.

As a wide-eyed teenager Marlborough film maker Paul Davidson was among the huge crowd on October 25, 1959, who saw two near misses, and unknowingly witnessed a third.

Davidson was a 14-year-old living in Hutt Valley when he and a mate travelled by train and tram to get to the air show to celebrate the official opening of the new airport.

As he watched in gale-force northerlies beside the runway, he saw a giant delta-wing Vulcan bomber almost crash in front of him. The bomber touched down short of the runway, rupturing part of its landing gear, wing attachments and engine fuel lines and narrowly avoiding clipping a wing tip that would have sent it cartwheeling towards the crowd.

The pilot aborted the landing and flew the damaged plane to Ohakea where it made an emergency landing.

A Sunderland flying boat had earlier hit the runway during a low pass, tearing a hole in its keel.

The experience was tucked away in Davidson’s memory and with the 60-year anniversary approaching he decided to turn his film-making lens on it.

With the help of friends in the air force and the Air Force Museum, he tracked down some of the pilots involved, and unearthed a third nearmiss that was metres away from disaster.

It involved the air force Vampire aerobatic team who came close to tragedy during their last act of the day, a high-speed dive towards the ground before the four planes broke into different directions. As the Vampires rolled into the dive a sudden bank of cloud obscured the ground, meaning the leader could not give the order to break. Davidson tracked down one of the pilots involved, Tom Enright, to describe the white-knuckle moments as the cloud finally cleared with dangerously little room left.

One witness estimated Enright’s plane was only 3 metres from the ground at the bottom of the dive and he