In New Zealand: Relive the wonder of flight

The Australian letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian bureau. To register to receive it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a Melbourne-based reporter.

Recently, some 32 years into my career as a veteran aviator, I experienced air travel as if for the very first time: the flight of angels, of billionaires, of dreams. (It was still in the coach class.)

On a recent reporting trip to New Zealand, I arranged to spend the weekend with an old friend who now lives near Havelock, a town of about 600 people at the top of the country’s South Island, about 50 miles south of west of Wellington, where I traveled from.

With the Cook Strait between New Zealand’s North and South Islands in the way, the easiest option was to take a domestic flight – one of hundreds that fly across the country every day.

Flying domestically in New Zealand is only marginally stricter than boarding a bus. If you don’t have luggage to check in, you can walk through the airport half an hour before your flight departs. No one will check your ID at any point and you don’t even have to show your boarding pass to go through security, which usually takes a minute or two, with no limit on liquids. At some smaller airports there is no security at all.

To reach Havelock, I booked a seat on a flight operated not by Air New Zealand, the national carrier, but by Sounds Air, one of the country’s much smaller ‘regional airlines’ of about half a dozen.

Leaving Sounds Air from Wellington bypasses security checks altogether. Your ticket to ride is little more than a reusable piece of green laminated paper that says ‘Boarding Pass to Blenheim’. Checking a bag? They hurl it into the back of the nine-seat plane. And don’t bother going to the carousel upon arrival. It will be handed to you when you get out.

The lack of hassle is entirely intentional, with some frequent flyers buying 10-way tickets for regular cross-strait flights, says Andrew Crawford, the airline’s chief executive.

“That’s our point of difference,” he said. “This is what people like.”

The airline was founded in 1986, with a single nine-seat Cessna Caravan taking people to the Marlborough Sounds. It now has ten aircraft – the largest of their aircraft seats twelve – and transports around 120,000 people a year, mostly on routes where there is no alternative to road.

Some passengers are commuters. Others are tourists. And then there are those who live in rural areas and need specialist medical care in larger cities. “If you have to have cancer treatment or day surgery, things like that,” he said. “That’s a big part of our business.”

These small airlines play a crucial role in helping New Zealanders get around in a country that has an extremely limited rail network and where many people live far from essential services.

But it was the flight itself that captivated me.

Under normal circumstances, elbow to elbow with strangers, the majesty of flying is somewhat displaced by the discomfort of sitting in a pressurized metal tube, and it’s easy to forget that you’re thousands of feet in the air. (Some people prefer to forget that.)

But at about 7,000 feet, low and slow enough that we could see wind turbines and steep hills unfolding before us, as if flying in a dream, the miracle of flight seemed unusual… miraculous.

The wind whistled past the cabin and I could see into the cockpit, over the solo pilot’s shoulder and through the windshield. When we reached land through the vineyards the region is known for, the grapes were almost visible on the vine. It wasn’t hard to imagine myself as an early aviator, and I had trouble keeping a grin off my face.

All in all, I told my waiting host, it was an experience somewhere between driving a minivan and traveling on a private jet.

Here are the stories of the week.

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