Thursday, March 10, 2011

Air New Zealand Boeing 777-319ER at Wellington

After the much-publicised visit of an Air New Zealand Boeing 777-319ER to Wellington a few weeks ago, they sent an aircraft in again earlier today. This was also on a tour to promote the aircraft to Air NZ's high-value customers [unfortunately I'm not one of them!]. ZK-OKM is pretty much a brand new aircraft, only appearing on the New Zealand register in late December.

The usual range of "larger" aircraft we get into Wellington, the Airbus A320's and Boeing B737's, look positively tiny next to this beast!

The first three photos are of the aircraft at gate 23, the second with a B737 [ZK-NGR] for a size comparison and the third with Air NZ's brand new A320, ZK-OAB, for comparison. Keep in mind that these aircraft only look this big as they are much closer to the camera than then B777!

The last image is after pushback, this time close to night time, hence the faded image.

After the images is the video I took on a cellphone of the aircraft taking off. It's amazing what you can do with a large airliner and 15 people on board, but still, this is incredible! Well under 1/2 the runway used and it climbed faster than any airliner I have seen here. Awesome!













6 comments:

Allister said...

Great comparison shots. The 737 one particularly. I read somewhere that the 777 engine diameter is similar to the 737 fuselage diameter and that certainly appears to be the case!

Rodney said...

Thank you Allister. Imagine how small that B737 would look if they were close to each other! :-)

Daniel said...

I just love the speed of it!

Check out my video of it coming in at 11:50am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj3eTn3xetg

Rodney said...

That's a nice video Daniel. Thanks for sharing it.

Lenny said...

Hope you enjoyed the roast at the club last night Rodney. Here's the video I took of the 777 the other day - Managed to capture radio chatter on the departure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZYM-Syey_0

Amazing how it shot up so quickly. :)

Rodney said...

Nice video Lenny. Thanks for sharing!