Hamilton and back on Air NZ

This past week I have been working in the Waikato - in several towns and the main city of Hamilton. The plan was to fly up on Monday and back on Friday using Air NZ [Air Nelson & Mount Cook] in both directions. I'm not a fan of early morning starts, but with my flight departing at 7:05am, I was never going to get a sleep in...

The weather in Wellington that morning was pretty much cruddy. So much so, that it seemed that no aircraft were able to land. It was just as well our Bombardier DHC-8-311 had overnighted at Wellington. There was a short delay to allow others to try an land [they all missed and diverted] before we [a colleague and I] got going.

The arrival into Hamilton was nice. The skies were fairly clear, no fog, but starting to get warm. The rest of the week was hot and muggy - not much fun, but such is life.

We finished early enough late Friday morning and so after lunch, headed out to Hamilton Airport [ICAO code: NZHN] about 3 hours early for our flight. We weren't able to change to the earlier flight [the boss won't buy flexi tickets], so we got comfortable for a long wait. About 45 minutes later we were paged, and due to fog being forecast at Wellington, we were shifted onto the earlier flight after all! The only real difference being that we would have another Air Nelson DHC-8 flight back home [instead on a Mount Cook ATR72]. Nice!

Anyway, we headed home and landed about 30 minutes before the fog hit. Yay!

In short, a couple of nice flights, good work by Air NZ in getting us there and back and for shifting us to the earlier flight. After a week away though, I'm kinda happy to have my own bed again :-)

Anyway, pictures. These are all from Hamilton this afternoon. Top to bottom are:

Bombardier DHC-8-311, ZK-NEZ [my ride home] & ZK-NEQ [off to Christcurch] of Air Nelson. Air NZ
Piper PA31, ZK-MJF, registered to the Taranaki Air Ambulance Trust
Mitsubishi MU-2B-30, ZK-KOH, registered to Search and Rescue Services of Taupo