The last weekend in October gave us the best weather in a long, long time in Wellington. Just longer than a month after the Spring Equinox, the beaches were packed and it seemed like every Wellingtonian was out doing something. Including this one.
My wife and I went out to Lyall Bay beach for a walk, and of course it is adjacent to Wellington Airport. While we were walking I saw departures of RNZAF Hercules and NH90 plus the arrival of “some kind of business jet” that I could not identify from where I was.
At the conclusion of our walk, I drove over to the airport just in time to capture the arrival of what I guessed was the same NH90 I had seen depart earlier. It turns out, it wasn’t the same one, but more on that in a moment. Here is NZ3303 creating its own heat haze to add to that of the warm Wellington day.
Whilst capturing the NH90, I noticed a small jet sitting outside the RNZAF Air Movements hangar and determined it to be an RAAF machine. I was not wrong, as when I nipped around to the other end of the apron, I found Bombardier Challenger CL604, A37-033.
On my way around the apron I also spotted this gorgeous Cessna 182RG Skylane, ZK-ETX.
I also FINALLY caught an all-white DHC-8-Q300, VH-SBW (no relation to the All Black with the same initials) which is operating for Jetstar.
Finally, when heading back to the car near the Aero Club, I spotted this gorgeous machine – Piper PA-46 Malibu, VH-BHR.
It was while ogling this that I spotted Rodney and had a quick chat with him. He told me that the previously departed NH90 was a different machine and that I had missed a RNZAF 757 departure, too. He suggested all the military activity was likely related to Exercise Southern Katipo which is occurring in the Marlborough region, just across the water.
One final thing I’d like to say is that over the last week or so I have changed the size of images that I upload to Flickr. For a while now, they have been limited to 2.7 megapixels, which usually resulted in something about 2000 pixels across the long side on a regularly framed image. At this size, I was finding that my images didn’t look their best on an iPad and were quite obviously less than their best on large screens like that on my iMac 5K. Now I’ve upped my standard size to 3200 pixels on the long side. Most images will now look a lot crisper on high definition displays as a result. Square images will be enormous! Note that a handful of images will be less than this size as a result of the original not having enough pixels to offer, usually as a result of tight cropping.
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