Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Pilot’s story
Awish to take the wider public into paradise prompted a Timaru tour company to start flying passenger planes to Mt Cook.
One of its pilots in those early days was John Evans, of Blenheim.
He says the 1950s and 1960s were ‘‘the golden age of flying’’.
The former Ashburton man joined the Mount Cook Southern Lakes Tourist Company in 1956. At that time, the company centred on flying holidaymakers in ski planes to out-of-the-way destinations in the Southern Alps.
John’s boss, World War II airforce pilot Harry Wigley, had seen a chance to expand his father Rudolf’s bus-touring business by flying tourists to places they were otherwise unlikely to see. Harry was also a keen skier, John says.
‘‘He knew about the paradise we had up there and he wanted to show it to people.’’
Mount Cook Airline’s first planes were four-seater, singleengine, English Austers. Harry had them fitted with home-made wooden skis so they could land on the Fox, Franz and Tasman glaciers.
‘‘They had to be retracted. We would take off on grass, then reach out the window and grab a lever to move [the skis].’’
Passengers’ own skis could be tied under the wings but the Auster’s single, 145-horsepower engine was not really powerful enough for the terrain being crossed or the weather conditions the Auster had to fly through. Harry replaced them with 230HP Cessna 180s. They had American-made skis and the pilot could raise or lower them with a hydraulic pump controlled from the cockpit.
‘‘Then [the business] really took off,’’ John says.
‘‘We had a few ‘incidents’,’’ he adds. Like the time Harry phoned from Timaru and dismissed John’s fears he would get stuck in snow if he took the plane to the glaciers that day.
Ordered to fly, John tucked a shovel into the aircraft and set off.
‘‘We landed on the Tasman Glacier, then went up to Ball Pass.’’
Adjacent to Mt Cook, the pass was covered in deep snow and the plane got stuck. Fetching the shovel, John dug a pathway toward ‘‘a big drop-off’’’. Then, pointing the plane toward it, he started the engine and pushed the throttle. ‘‘And off we went’’. Mount Cook Airline was launched in 1962 and two years later the first passenger plane arrived in Queenstown.
The resort then was just a ‘‘small town perched on the side of a hill’’. Its airfield had a grass runway and the airport ‘‘terminal’’ was a concrete block shed.
John was a co-pilot on the second day’s flight to Queenstown. The Douglas DC-3 planes Mount Cook Airline was using had transported troops