ROUGH RIDE
After 80 years of flying further, faster and more often, our national carrier is forced back to its humble roots. Lorna Thornber reports.
It’s hard to watch the video Air New Zealand created to mark its 80th birthday on April 30 and not feel some sense of loss.
As much as we liked to complain about the airline before the coronavirus pandemic stopped its global fleet in its tracks, many of us were proud to call one of the world’s top-rated airlines our national carrier. And many of our most memorable journeys began and ended with them.
In January, Air New Zealand’s future looked bright. Thriving in a golden age of travel, the airline had posted a healthy profit thanks to a booming tourism sector, low fuel prices and sound management.
With new aircraft on order, a non-stop service to New York on the horizon, and potentially game-changing economy class sleep pods in the works, it seemed the sky was the limit.
And then the Covid-19 crisis happened, travel was brought to a near-standstill worldwide, and Air New Zealand, like all other airlines, was forced to ground planes, axe routes and lay off staff.
When Air New Zealand forerunner Tasman Empire Airways Ltd (TEAL) first flew from Mechanics Bay in Auckland to Rose Bay in Sydney in 1940, the trip took nine hours with 10 passengers aboard the ‘‘flying boat’’.
Within a month of the government ordering three Short S30 Empire flying boats to launch New Zealand’s first passenger aircraft service, World War II was declared and Britain decided it could only spare two. Operated by TEAL, the two aircraft, Aotearoa and Awarua, remained New Zealand’s only link to the outside world throughout the war – but only the well-off could afford a ticket.
In the 1990 documentary Reaching for the Skies – an End to Isolation, Peggy Finley, a passenger on one of these early trans-Tasman flights, said they were ‘‘very exciting, very romantic and visually a fantastic experience’’. One dressed, she said, ‘‘as if you were going to Ellerslie Racecourse’’ and meals were oysters and tomato soup followed by roast chicken, ham and salad. With fruit salad, cheese and biscuits for dessert.
Designed for coastal flights and short hops, the flying boats were pushed to their limits over the turbulent Tasman Sea.
In the documentary, former TEAL chief pilot Oscar Garden recounted the experience of hitting a ‘‘very bad headwind’’ halfway across the Tasman after receiving a ‘‘crook weather forecast’’. Too late to turn back, they pushed forward, arriving in Sydney 12 hours and 10 minutes after takeoff. ‘‘The engineer said we had about five minutes’ petrol left.’’
TEAL’s trans-Tasman services to Sydney continued for 20 years, providing, as New Zealand encyclopaedia Te Ara puts it, ‘‘a memorable spectacle for thousands of people, as well as a luxurious style of air travel few would experience again’’.
TEAL used British-made Solents, considered the last of the great flying boats, on its worldfamous Coral Route from Auckland to Fiji, Samoa, the Cook Islands and Tahiti, still considered one of the world’s most romantic journeys ever.
Taking 30 hours, the journey included a brief stopover on the Cook Island of Aitutaki, during which passengers enjoyed lunch and a swim while the plane refuelled. ‘‘They came out and collected us off the flying boat and we were taken on to this gorgeous little atoll where you could put your bathing suit on and they covered you with leis,’’ says Finley, who also flew the Coral Route.
On the domestic front, 1945 proved a pivotal year, with new legislation creating a single domestic airline, the National Airways Corporation, which assumed control of private airlines two years later.
In its first five years of operation, the fledgling domestic airline lost money and suffered three fatal crashes but, with
Kiwis taking to flying like they weren’t named after flightless birds, it still managed to expand. By 1952, it was in the black again and the airline remained the dominant domestic airline until its enforced merger with Air New Zealand in 1978.
New Zealand had entered the jet era by the time the government took full control of TEAL in 1961, changing its name to Air New Zealand in 1965.
Air New Zealand soon moved into its new base in Auckland’s Ma¯ ngere with the Americanmade Douglas DC-8 as its flagship aircraft. The long-range jet enabled the airline to spread its wings and, within a few years, it had increased trans-Tasman and Pacific Island services and begun flying to Asia, North America and the United Kingdom.
In those days, air travel was a glamorous affair. Even those in the cheap seats were welcomed aboard with eye masks, socks and packs of postcards, and air hostesses in Christian Dior dresses served three-course meals on bespoke Crown Lynn dinnerware.
First-class passengers had whole crayfish delivered to their seats. Less glamorously, everyone either smoked or inhaled it – the bar menu included a selection of cigarettes, and the division between the smoking and non-smoking sections was hazy.
Kiwis quickly began to take pride in their small but plucky international carrier and this, together with a boom in tourism, saw the airline flourish financially, enabling it to transition to all-jet, wide-body and jumbo aircraft.
In 1979, however, the year after its merger with NAC, Air New Zealand experienced what remains both the airline’s – and New Zealand’s – deadliest disaster when a sightseeing flight over Antarctica crashed into Mt Erebus, killing all 257 people on board.
As Michael Wright said in the
White Silence podcast released by Stuff in November 2019 to mark