Whenuapai Air Show

Kia ora Koutou
Last weekend, Eric Stuart and I travelled down to Auckland on Friday night with the air cadets for the Whenuapai Air show. We had a very interesting weekend.

I had never been to an airshow before. Nor had the boys. To be honest, I wasn't really all that keen on going away for an entire weekend with a whole bunch of teenagers. But the bottom line was that if I didn't go then neither did about 5 cadets. So I did my school work by 3.15 and we met up at cadet HQ at 6pm. Eric has been going to ATC every Wednesday for over a year now. It is quite a small unit that struggles to stay viable at times as cadets and officers come and go. It has given Eric a valuable activity out of school for the last year. With regular weekend trips either out camping, or going shooting.

We arrived in Auckland at about midnight and were waved through the gates into the air-base. Couldn't see a lot as it was pitch black. Cadets debussed and were told to make sure that their uniforms were ironed before crashing out. Wake up at 5.15 am. That is a few hours before my normal wake up time on a Saturday - I thought to myself.

Up we got and had a shower that made me feel vaguely human. As a parent helper along with a couple of other blokes, I spent most of the day watching the cadets and air force go about putting on a huge public event. We had a quick breakfast and then the cadets paraded and were inspected, before marching off to the edge of the airfield. They were based in the parachute training hangar out of the sun and heat of the day. They were made up of units from Thames, Morrinsville, Kaikohe and Kaitaia and numbered over 100. Air force regulars had been drafted in from the other RNZAF base to help out, but the cadets basically ran the barricades and parking for the day. They made sure that the public stayed off the runway. Stuart and Eric did shifts of 1 1/2 hours on and 11/2hours off. It was a lot of work for such young fellas and they were looking pretty cream crackered by the end of the show at 5pm.

Meanwhile I was pretty much a free agent, getting free access to the show. I am not really a machine head at all, but the planes were interesting. Who could fail to be impressed by the huge Globemaster that supplies bases on te Antarctic and can land on a 300m runway. Or the thwack-twack of the Iroquois choppers zipping around.

My big fave was the Australian FA-18 jets called Hornets. One did a display to round off the show and the sheer noise and power and speed of the thing was awesome. It is difficult to describe in words what this aircraft was capable of doing, but it did not seem possible. I took loads of video but that does not really do it justice. With all the planes I was glad that it was a friendly airshow and not a war zone as I would have cacked myself!

Stuart got to do guard duty on the main runway at the point where the parachutists landed and he immediately attracted the attentions of a number of chatty women! Eric was stuck on car park duty for ages.

At the end of the day all the cadets were summoned to the far end of the base, the rumour being that we were going to be given a Hercules flight to thank us for our help. Instead we got to shift a couple of Km of crash barriers and to pick up litter off the entire base! All in all a good intro to life in the forces, bringing back memories of being a cadet myself, sitting around for hours waiting for orders and then being ordered (rather than asked!) to do something mindless.

We had takeaway pizza that night and the cadets all watched a film and passed out.

It felt like having a lie-in getting up at 7am on Sunday morning after the previous day. We got a full breakfast in the Mess and then use of the 25m swimming pool on the base. The group visited the War section of Auckland Museum before heading back to Kaitaia in the afternoon.

All in all a good weekend, though I have to admit that I am quite happy to have a chilled out w/e now to recover.