Flights of
A lifelong aviation fan has a bold plan to bring home five historic Kiwi airliners that have been lost for decades. Jack Barlow reports.
They were once the pride of New Zealand’s air fleet, great passenger planes that carried hundreds of thousands of people and helped shape this nation’s history.
Now they lie scattered in farflung corners of the world, dilapidated, forgotten.
Well, almost. Thanks to a small handful of airplane buffs, an ambitious new project has been launched to recover these artefacts of New Zealand’s aviation past.
Bring Our Birds Home is seeking to repatriate five historic airliners that played key roles in establishing air routes throughout the country.
All took part in the explosion of New Zealand’s domestic air routes pioneered by Air New Zealand, TEAL and the New Zealand National Airways Corporation (NAC) from the 1950s to the 1980s.
The project was born a year ago when Paul Brennan, a lifelong aviation fan and prominent radio personality, realised that several important aircraft types didn’t seem to exist in New Zealand anymore.
If they weren’t here, he wondered, did they end up somewhere else?
‘‘Airliners don’t usually last very long once they’re out of service,’’ he says. ‘‘They tend to get broken up pretty quickly, which is why there aren’t a whole lot of older ones around. I expected all these ones to be gone.’’
After a search online, Brennan discovered that there was exactly one surviving example of each of the aircraft he was looking for.
‘‘The odds of that were just unbelievable,’’ he says.
That they existed at all was the good news. The bad news was that they turned out to be in various states of disrepair, in all sorts of corners of the world.
Their histories are fascinating. One is the very first Boeing 747 ever to fly in New Zealand. Another flew New Zealand’s very first passenger jet service.
Perhaps the most interesting of all is ZK-NZC, a former Air New Zealand DC-8. It ended up on the outskirts of a sodden airfield in Manaus, Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon River.
Looking at the dilapidated airframe, with holes and peeling paint, it’s hard to imagine that this was once a plane fit for a queen.
Yet it was, quite literally; there is a photo of the very same aircraft in its heyday, parked on a Rarotonga airfield with the Queen’s flag proudly fluttering out the window.
‘‘Now it’s just a broken-down old freighter in the jungles of Brazil,’’ Brennan says, ‘‘but it flew the Queen around the Pacific during the 1974 Commonwealth Games. It’s a very important plane, one that helped bring us into the jet age.’’
The DC-8’s service record shows what happens when the glory days fade. After being retired from Air New Zealand service in 1982 after 17 years, it shuffled around the world as a freighter.
Following several years in California it headed south to Panama and then to Brazil, where it has remained.
Though he can’t give too much away, Brennan says the DC-8 is one of the most promising prospects so far, despite its poor condition.
‘‘We’ve had good engagement with the Brazilian embassy, who understand the cultural value of preserving these planes,’’ he says.
‘‘We know who owns it, we know how much money it owes them, we know how to sort out the paperwork. It’s all do-able.’’
Of course, Brennan is under no illusions about the task in front of the Bring Our Birds Home project. He freely admits it’s the most ambitious airline-recovery project in New Zealand’s history; it’s hard to find a project on a similar scale internationally, either.
They’re starting small. The first stage is to raise money for Brennan and an aircraft engineer to travel to It’s sad to see the state of some of them now. Looking at them certainly brings back a lot of memories. view the aircraft in person, assess their conditions and make contact with the relative authorities. The ‘ball park’ figure for the first stage of proceedings is somewhere around the $20,000-35,000 mark.
Later on, if it comes to it, the cost of the hangar which might eventually house the aircraft is estimated at somewhere around $8 million.
The bulk of funding will come from public donations, particularly via the group’s now-active Givealittle page. There is also likely to be help from other quarters, although Brennan won’t elaborate too much.
‘‘There is a business element to it, yes,’’ he admits, although that’s about as much as he’ll say.
One of the biggest costs will be retrieving the airliners from where they currently lie. It’s a daunting process, given they’re in areas as disparate as Cuba, Canada and Russia. Take the DC-8, for example, stranded on the outskirts of the Amazon River in Manaus.
There’s also the issue of communication. Just a few days ago, the group’s plans changed substantially when they finally heard back from Russia regarding one of their most notable acquisition targets, a former Air New Zealand Boeing 747-200.
Though they’d seen pictures and figured it was possibly even in flyable condition, the truth was different. After lying disused for years, it had been dismantled and scrapped at the beginning of 2015.
‘‘Russia isn’t the easiest place in the world to deal with, especially when you can’t speak Russian,’’ Brennan says, with a touch of disappointment.
It was a similar story for another plane, the North Carolina-based Boeing 737 they’d had their eye on.
Locals repeatedly scrambled over a fence and broke into it, until the plane’s owner finally had enough and sent it to a scrapyard.
The campaign was tantalisingly close, with the 737 meeting its end only in November last year.
Losing two key aircraft could have been a near-terminal blow. And yet, showing that fortune really does favour the brave – or, at least, the ambitious – Brennan quickly discovered there were replacements ready to fill the gap.
First it turned out there was one more Air New Zealand 747 in existence, sitting relatively wellkept in the dry Arizona desert.
Then there turned out to be another ex-New Zealand 737 as well, an example in Quebec that is still flying.
Not only did Brennan plug the gap, but he found two planes that are, almost certainly, in better condition than the ones he wanted in the first place.
‘‘We’ve still got five types of aircraft, and we’ve confirmed that all five are in existence,’’ Brennan says.
‘‘It’s all part of the drama, part of the global treasure hunt.’’
News of the group’s plans has excited aviation groups throughout the country. Some, though, are daunted by the obvious challenges involved.
Peter Allen personally served on several of the targeted aircraft as a flight engineer, starting with the Lockheed Electra in 1964.
He’s delighted at the idea, but concerned about just how it’s going to work. He’s been involved with aircraft repatriation before, and it hasn’t always gone to plan.
‘‘It’s sad to see the state of some of them now,’’ he says. ‘‘Looking at them certainly brings back a lot of memories. It would be really great to have them back here, and I definitely think it’s an interesting idea, but some of the practicalities concern me.
‘‘It’s not easy transporting aircraft from that far away, especially given the state some of them are in.’’
Brennan, more than anyone, is aware of the potential difficulties. It’s why he’s taking things in steps, with securing the airframes coming first.
Storing them, possibly in the dry, safe Arizona desert will come next. The question of what to do with them if and when they make it back to New Zealand is far in the future.
Still, if things make it that far there are plans to create an aviation display along the lines of Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
Bring our Birds Home has even created an image of what such a display would look like. It’s certainly arresting: five gleaming airliners, as sharp as in their heyday, side-by-side under a tidy white roof.
‘‘A museum with these planes would be a big boost for tourism,’’ Brennan says. ‘‘It would do great business, there’s no doubt about it.’’
The first phase of fundraising, through crowdfunding, has just launched. Early signs are encouraging. Not only is the financial situation looking promising, but embassies and companies involved with the aircraft are proving receptive. Meetings are being set up by the week.
Brennan says the whole idea, taking in the thousands of dollars, thousands of hours and acres of paperwork, isn’t simply about aircraft. It’s about preserving New Zealand’s history.
‘‘Really, I look at these planes as modern equivalents of the oceangoing ancestral waka which transported Maori to New Zealand,’’ he says.
‘‘For less than the cost of a flag referendum you could save and display these planes, which are really national treasures, taonga.
‘‘If they’re there – which they are – it can be done.’’