A back country pilot like no other
With a can-do-anything attitude and a lifelong passion for flying, Jim Larsen was described as the Indiana Jones of the Air.
Although his home was on a sprawling farm in the remote backblocks of Whanganui, his tourist flying business Remote Adventures was based at Takaka Aerodrome – its lone house where he resided with wife Juliet off and on for the last decade and a half.
It was through this operation that Jim became well known in northwest Nelson, carting trampers and adventurers all over the show in his red and white Cessna 185.
Jim was 84 when he passed away from an aortic aneurysm on September 15. Farming and flying up until the day he died, his life had been extraordinary, one which could never remotely be duplicated again. He was a man of his time, and his place.
Born on July 30, 1935, Frederick James (Jim) Larsen was the fourth of five children born to Fred and Hazel Larsen, who farmed a 1000-hectare property right up the top of the remote Upper Waitotara Valley, in the backblocks between South Taranaki and Whanganui.
When his first school at Taumatatahi was shut down after the roll shrank to just Jim and his brother Bob, they were sent to Ngamatapouri School, which was just as remote. Whanganui Intermediate preceded Whanganui Collegiate, where for several years Jim held the one-mile running record.
Not one to be restrained, though, he left school at 15 to work on the family farm. He was soon smitten with flying, after loading bagged superphosphate into a Tiger Moth topdressing plane.
Jim immediately joined the Wanganui Aero Club, and attained his private pilot’s licence by 16. But it wasn’t only in the air that he felt free – he and Bob earned the nicknames Thunder and Lightning for the way they drove down the normally quiet valley into town.
When Jim was 22, the brothers bought their own Tiger Moth, which they used for getting around the farm, even using it to fly into town.
On one trip, Jim took in a broken chainsaw to be mended, and stayed on for at a dance at the Aramoho Rowing Club, where he met wife-to-be Juliet Earle when the ‘‘excuse me’’ dance gave him a chance to invite her for a joyride in his plane. She recalls that first flight together as scary – she was unable to communicate with him because the cone speaker system was plugged up by a mason bee nest.
They married in 1961, but not before Jim had to sell the plane to buy the engagement ring. The couple ended up having five children – Wendy, Kirsty, Peter, James and Penelope.
It was on their honeymoon that Jim purchased two big circular saws, the basis for his sawmill, which is still operating. The procedure was to cut and haul out the massive rimu, to¯ tara and kahikatea logs during the drier summer months, then mill them during winter, when it was almost impossible to get around for all the mud.
All the time pining to fly, it took Jim until 1973 to buy another plane, this time a Cessna 185, registration CKO, which he would fly for the next 43 years. This became his workhorse – he even used it to feed out hay, with Juliet in the back wearing a crash helmet and pushing the bales out.
They were seen doing just that when their farm featured on Country Calendar. Jim and his plane featured in all sorts of TV programmes and magazines, including Gone Fishing, NZ Farmer and CAA News. His flying abilities stood out.
Jim used the six-seater plane to not only fly his family around the country on holidays, but also to Australia in 2002.
He got his commercial licence in 1983, and started offering scenic and charter flights around the Central Plateau, and taking thar hunters down to Fox Glacier. With son Peter, Jim set up Remote Adventures, specialising in hunting and jetboating opportunities.
Perhaps his most far-fetched flying antics began to revolve around a new deer farm he bought up the Ahu Ahu Valley in 1983, where he set up one of the largest fallow deer farms in the country.
When the bridge providing access to the farm was washed away, he shifted his herd of 800 deer to his Waitotara farm in his Cessna, a dozen at a time. Later on, when Juliet wanted to bring her horse back to the farm from Takaka, Jim, having one of his many tongue-in-cheek moments, suggested to others that tranquillising it and taking it across in his plane could work.
After selling the farm at Ahu Ahu, he diversified into grazing cows, and catching eels in the Waitotara River and flying them to Stratford for processing.
But Jim and Juliet’s big shift came in the early 2000s, after a visit to see friends in Golden Bay convinced him that carting trampers to and from the Heaphy Track, not to mention offering scenic flights, was the way to go.
He seemed unstoppable until a major heart operation saw his commercial licence taken off him, but he continued to fly in a personal capacity until he crashed his Cessna three years ago while attempting to land at a Westmere farm in bad weather.
Ironically, Jim had chosen the airstrip because he couldn’t see any good reason to pay the landing fee at the local aerodrome. And he was on his way to do his medical! After kicking out the window of his upturned plane, he carried on to his appointment, where he proved to have normal blood pressure.
Without a plane, but still pining for flight, Jim went out and bought a Savannah microlight, which he used regularly until his death.
Although softly spoken, Jim could tell many a good story, usually involving himself.
I had the privilege of flying with him on several occasions, most memorably from Takaka on a 51⁄2-hour flight to Gorge River airstrip in South Westland to meet Richard (Beansprout) and Catherine Long, the remotest living couple in New Zealand.
One story Jim told us while staying at Gorge River Hut that night was how on a 10-minute flight from his home farm to the deer farm, he found a stowaway possum that must have crawled up into the plane’s warm engine cowling while it was parked up the night before. Halfway through the flight, two little paws suddenly appeared between the whirling propeller and engine cowling, then the face of the freaked-out possum – which eyeballed him for a few seconds before being whisked away by the slipstream.
Jim said his last sight of the critter was of it hurtling down to the bush below. He reckoned it would have survived and just gone on its way.
There was just no-one else like Jim – he always made flying a true adventure.