A long time coming

Forgive my not posting here in a long, long time. That thing called life has been getting in the way of having time to process all my photos, let alone write about them. But the wait is over.

This post will catch up on the first half of the year.

First up, a trip to Wanganui in April afforded the opportunity to stop off at RNZAF Base Ohakea along the way. There were a few helicopter operations in the vicinity, but the only decent photos I got were of a handful of Beechcraft T-6 Texan IIs such as NZ1409 shown here doing a touch and go.

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Next was a visit to Wellington International Airport, where the first activity was local MBB BK117, ZK-HLF, swooping in over Lyall Bay to alight on the Western Apron.

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There was the usual fare, so I tried to capture some more interesting angles than the standard views. Here, Jetstar’s Airbus A320, VH-VFQ, is about to alight on RWY34.

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Here we have Fiji Airways’ Boeing 737-800, DQ-FJH, a wee bit earlier on finals.

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And I had deliberately timed my visit to capture Singapore Airlines’ Boeing 777-200ER, 9V-SRP.

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The SIA 777 is by far the largest aircraft to regularly visit Wellington, and this shot illustrates just how much bigger it is than the typical jets, such as Air New Zealand Airbus A320, ZK-OXJ!

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The final sight for the day, I missed landing as I was heading off home, but having spotted it from the car, I was able to hop out for this shot across the apron of Virgin Australia’s Boeing 737-800, VH-VOR, which carries no markings at all apart from the registration, and the Boeing type identification above it.

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Moving forward to June, this magnificent beast was captured coming over my house on 3rd June. It is Airbus A350-900, F-WXWB, operated by Airbus themselves, and visiting little old Wellington for some performance testing. Apparently we have a grooved runway and it was what they were looking for for some wet weather tests.

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The following day I headed out to the airport to see if I could catch it operating, but having missed an early flight, wouldn’t you know it… the Wellington weather wouldn’t co-operate by providing rain! Nevertheless, I caught this reasonable shot of it parked up.

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As always, there are more photos on Flickr, which I’ve grouped for you here:

5th April, Ohakea

20th May, Wellington

3rd-4th June, Wellington

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