Brad Lynton (left) joined SSAS in January 1963 as an aircraft engineering apprentice and spent his entire working life at Queenstown. The other four were SSAS pilots: Russell Troon (joined early 1953), Paddy Moxham (1962), Dave Cowan (1962) and Rex Dovey (1961). Their flying experience adds up to some 75,500hr.
Even the bare numbers were impressive in terms of company reunions—130 for a hangar party, with the last revellers being shooed out at an honourably late hour, and 86 for a sit-down lunch the following day at a local vineyard.
But even more impressive was the turnout in terms of names. Considering the reunion involved a series of companies with origins 70 years ago—and a series of anniversaries commemorating nothing younger than 50 years—the list of names represented was remarkable. Where the original protagonists were unable to attend, for such reasons as having passed on, many of their families were there to represent some famous and revered names such as Lucas, Topliss, Hewett, Nairn, Bell, Cheetham, Wilkes, Ewington, Waugh, Buckham, Poole and Houston.
The Aviation Pioneers and Families Reunion, held in Queenstown during the weekend of 8–9 April, catered for former staff (up to about 1975) and families, commemorating Southern Scenic Air Services (70 years since its start in 1947 and 60 years since it inaugurated the first Queenstown–Invercargill scheduled service); SSAS subsidiary West Coast Airways (60 years since its formation and 50 years from its closure); and (near enough) the 50th anniversary of the Mt Cook Airline takeover in January 1968 of the previously combined collection of SSAS, Ritchie Air Services, WCA and Tourist Air Travel.
With bases in Invercargill, Te Anau, Queenstown, Hokitika, Mount Cook and Auckland, these pioneering small airlines of the 1950s and 1960s were run by former wartime servicemen and were colourful examples of postwar optimism and the can-do attitude prevalent in New Zealand at the time. The challenges they met and overcame were many—raising sufficient capital, working with the political, regulation and licensing bureaucracy of the time, flying obsolete aircraft, attracting sufficient passengers, dealing with engine failures, overcoming accidents and sometimes their tragic outcomes—and always coping with the mountainous terrain and turbulent weather.
The airlines
First out of the gate in 1947 was Southern Scenic Airtrips (the name was changed in 1952), flying from the grass airstrip which was formerly Queenstown’s racecourse, and with the remains of its cob grandstand still visible today behind the hangars which date from the early 1950s. Southern Scenic was started by Fred “Popeye” Lucas and Bill Hewett, both experienced wartime pilots, and Barry Topliss, a licensed engineer with experience in Cook Strait Airways and the Fleet Air Arm.
SSAS survived more than the usual vicissitudes of a small company—personal injury, the loss of aeroplanes in remote places, differences of opinion among the directors—and by the late 1950s had expanded its fleet to include four DH89 Dominies, one Proctor, three Austers and three Cessna 180s, one of which was soon put on amphibious floats. An airstrip at Milford Sound, first explored in the 1930s by Arthur Bradshaw, was developed and the airline’s activities included a wide range of aerial work as well as passenger services.
Its West Coast Airways subsidiary continued the Hokitika-based regional operations started in 1934 by Bert Mercer’s Air Travel (NZ) Ltd, our nation’s first licensed scheduled air service, and continued after WWII by NZNAC but relinquished in 1956. When the Haast Pass road was finally completed to connect Otago with South Westland in 1965, the need for an airline dropped right away and WCA’s personnel and aircraft were absorbed back into the main Queenstown operation in April 1967.
Amphibian Airways was formed in October 1950 by local Invercargill interests out of an original inspiration by Bill Hewett, operating Grumman Widgeon amphibians into the numerous Fiordland waterways and across to Stewart Island as well as servicing the Puysegur Point lighthouse, New Zealand’s most remote.
The airline’s numerous operations for social purposes—search and rescue and ambulance flights—combined with the Widgeon pair’s usefulness in transporting hunters and fishermen around otherwise inaccessible parts of Fiordland, weren’t sufficient to ensure its survival, and in January 1962 Amphibian Airways was taken over by Auckland-based Tourist Air Travel, still keeping one Widgeon in Invercargill.
TAT was started by Fred Ladd, with Invercargill financial control, in 1955 at Mechanics Bay, the TEAL flying boat base on the southern shore of Waitemata Harbour. Thanks to its founder’s outgoing personality, penchant for memorable (the kindest description) couplets and well-developed sense of promotion, TAT and its Widgeons were quickly accepted by the Auckland public and especially residents of the numerous islands of the Hauraki Gulf, although operations from lakes further south were strongly resisted by other carriers, not all of which actually offered flights from them.
Back in the south, wartime Mosquito pilot and postwar topdresser Ian Ritchie recognised the need for a Southland-based airline. Ritchie Air Services was formed in 1960 at Gore, his home town, initially offering training for topdressing pilots as a way to circumvent restrictive licensing rules but soon branching out into tourist flying from an airstrip behind the Fiordland Hotel at Te Anau.
The change to air charter and air taxi services was made official at a hotly contested hearing in April 1961, and RAS moved its operational base to Te Anau in June 1962 with one each of DH89 Dominie and Cessna 180—and a Tiger Moth—on tourist flights to Milford Sound, SAR work, supply dropping and collecting whitebait in season. New Zealand’s first Cessna 206, ZK-CHQ, started work with RAS as a floatplane in February 1965 and promptly capsized on Lake McKerrow in March but was back in service in mid-May.
The first hints of a merger with TAT were heard in early 1964 and achieved later that year, but an offer by the Civil Aviation Department for Ian Ritchie to join it as a general aviation operations officer was too good to resist. His last flight for the company he founded, in Dominie ZK-AKY at Te Anau, was on 20 August 1966.
The enlarged Tourist Air Travel merged with Southern Scenic and its West Coast Airways subsidiary, and on 1 January 1968 came the final move in the tourist airline saga when TAT was merged into the Mount Cook Group.
“When TAT took over Southern Scenic and Ritchie Air Services, Harry Wigley and we found ourselves in court all the time, fighting on opposite sides for air service licences,” recalled Owen Marshall, TAT chairman.
“So TAT and Mount Cook merged. We were a similar size in capital and that sort of thing.”
In many ways that marked a full circle in independent airline endeavours. Rodolph Wigley’s South Canterbury-based New Zealand Aero Transport Company acquired war surplus Avro 504Ks and DH9s, and from 1920 made a number of pioneering flights throughout the country until the general collapse of aviation two years later.
In 1938 his son Harry started Queenstown-Mount Cook Airways with a Waco cabin biplane on the scenic and tourist sector. After wartime instructing and service in the Pacific, he revived the flying side of the company in the early 1950s, and Mount Cook Air Services grew into aerial topdressing, rabbit poisoning, supply dropping and rescue missions in the mountainous parts of the South Island. Harry (later Sir Harry) Wigley devised the use of retractable skis on Auster J/1B ZK-BDX and in September 1955 made the first skiplane landing on the Tasman Glacier.
His intention was scheduled air services to supplement the Mount Cook and Southern Lakes Tourist Company’s coach services from Christchurch to the tourist centres. Airfields were constructed, without government aid, at several key locations and in 1961 the first DC-3 was put into service, joined by two others a few years later.
So by the end of the 1960s the newly enlarged company ran everything from venison recovery and aerial topdressing to scheduled flights, with amphibian operations based in Invercargill and Auckland, floatplanes at Te Anau, Queenstown Dominie and Cessna flightseeing to Milford Sound, skiplanes at Mt Cook and a wide variety of work in dropping supplies to hunter or trampers, often landing them on remote airstrips in the mountains and valleys of South Westland and Fiordland.
Over time the airline’s General Aviation Division grew to include Twin Otter and Britten-Norman Islander scheduled and scenic operations, and its engineering services were expanded to cater for a wider market, not just the Mount Cook fleet.
But as the scheduled airline side of Mount Cook grew from DC-3s to Hawker Siddeley 748s up and down the country, it attracted the interest of Air New Zealand which, after managing to acquire 90 percent of the company, compelled the remaining private shareholders to sell out, much against their will. The smaller GA operations were sold off piecemeal and Mount Cook is now merely another, mostly anonymous, part of the major carrier.
Even the Mt Cook lily, for decades a proud emblem on the tail of New Zealand’s leading tourist aircraft, has disappeared.
“There’s a lot of loyalty to Mount Cook in the local district,” said Owen Marshall during those last days. “And so there should be—Queenstown wouldn’t be the same without the company.”
The celebration
That underlying loyalty to what was essentially a series of family- and personality-inspired GA operators doubtless drew so many of the original people and families to attend this one-off celebration in Queenstown.
And not only people. A number of aeroplanes which had served the various airlines were brought along by their present owners and put on display in and around Air Milford’s hangar during the Friday evening function. Cessna 180s ZK-BDE, BJY and BMS had all survived early topdressing and Queenstown- and Te Anau-based tourist flying—and in some cases much more rigorous subsequent careers—and are now in the rather more cosseted ownership of Roger Hewett, Brian Doig and Roger Monk respectively.
Queen of the hangar—as distinct from being a hangar queen—was DH89B Dominie ZK-AKY, whose presence was sponsored by the Queenstown Airport Corporation and which, after retirement from NZNAC, had been flown by Ritchie Air Services, TAT and Mount Cook. Adam Butcher was kept busy all weekend flying former pilots, staff members, their families and anybody else willing to sample the joys of a vintage airliner around the local scenic spots.
The most significant flight was a Sunday morning missing man formation, with the Dominie leading C180 BDE and C185 ENW over a Palm Sunday service at Frankton Presbyterian Church which was led by Rev. Dr Richard Waugh. The service included a tribute to those who died in the service of those pioneering airlines—pilots Tom Harris (West Coast Airways, 1957), Geoffrey Houston (West Coast Airways, 1964), Alan Nicholas (Southern Scenic, 1965), Eion Buckham (Ritchie Air Services, 1965) and Roger Poole (Mount Cook, 1970) and in three cases their passengers.
The church’s location off the end of the main runway required close cooperation of Queenstown ATC for the two low-level runs down the runway, aided by perfect weather.
The weather capped off a brilliant weekend. The reunion was conceived by Richard Waugh, noted for his series of early airline commemorations and aviation history books, with organisation on the ground by Air Milford’s Hank Sproull, himself a Mount Cook engineer and pilot of that era, and his staff and family.
Anecdotes flew thick and fast, people mingled to an unusual extent, and everybody took advantage of the opportunity to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime celebration of a unique set of pioneering tourist airlines.
- Report by John King, photographs by John King.