There is lots of business going on around Taieri Airfield, and there is a real community feel to the area, too. Nick Bosma takes a look at the history and happenings in the air around Mosgiel.
Taieri Airfield was the closest thing Dunedin had to an airport until 1962.
The New Zealand National Airways Corporation (NAC) ran its operations out of Taieri until the Dunedin International Airport opened that year, and the Otago Aero Club hangar at the airfield still bears the NAC mark.
No longer controlled by an air tower - unless pilots intend to exceed certain altitudes in certain areas - the airfield today is still a busy place, if the traffic is somewhat smaller than Boeings.
The aero club, and the more than half a dozen businesses dotted around it, ensure many aircraft movements in and out each day.
Weekends are busier with private and training flights, but those also occur during the week, alongside the comings and goings of commercial helicopters, rescue helicopters, agricultural/airspreading companies, charter flights and other aircraft.
Non-aviation related activity at the airfield includes Coventry Classics, a company that manufactures Jaguar C Type replicas, and the Taieri Blokes Shed, where members go to use communal tools and machines to build things.
The Dunedin City Council owns the land, and the Otago Aero Club leases it on a long-term basis.
The history of the airfield goes back to the 1920s, with the Otago Aero Club established there in 1927.
It could be New Zealand's oldest airfield, but an occupation by the Royal New Zealand Airforce, which used it as a training school for pilots between September 1939 and 1959, puts that in question.
Warwick Sims is the club president. He has dark hair and dark tinted glasses.
His walk is easy-going and he knows who has each of the 29 hangars dotted around the airfield, and what is inside them.
Sometimes there is more than one plane, and sometimes one or more of those planes is in more than one piece.
The club offers training for commercial flying and general and microlight aviation.
There are five microlight instructors and two of them also teach general aviation.
The more than 120 flying members of the club, aged between 18 and 80, come and go as they please.
The more than 65 aircraft on the fieldinclude a dozen or sobelonging to Helicopters Otago, the biggest commercial operation using the field. Anyone can put a hangar up, but construction requires council consent and a lease of the space from the club.
Mr Sims says there are new hangars going up all the time, especially with the boom in ''microlight'' aviation, which uses light fixed-wing aircraft, small enough to be pushed and pulled while on foot, that run on road fuel, making flying more affordable.
It is also bringing more people to the club for training, and new members, both of which are good for the club.
If you go to the Taieri Airfield at any time, you will see action, much of it from commercial enterprise, or the rescue helicopter and also from the various members of the aero club community.
The sight of Neil Sutherland taking off in his self-assembled Falcomposite Furio plane, with its four-cylinder engine, is impressive to watch.
There are only three of these planes registered to fly in New Zealand.
Not long after it leaves the ground, Mr Sims reckons it is travelling about 300kmh. A few hangars along, Colin Chalmers' homemade gyrocopter sits ready to go.
Mr Chalmers is not in today, but his aircraft has two propellers, one on the top and one at the back.
The rear one is powered by a motor, but the top one keeps itself going with the wind and its own momentum.
Mr Sims says it is the safest form of flying.
If a gyrocopter loses engine power, only forward momentum is lost. With the top rotor still spinning from the wind and its own momentum, it's just a matter of picking a spot to land.
At Custom Aviation's workshop hangar, Vince Gardner, also the Otago Aero Club captain, and a flying instructor, is assembling a plane from a kit for a client. He is working from a diagram on the workbench. It is quite hard to make a plane unsafely, he says, because every partis numbered, and , when finished, checked step-by-step by two qualified engineers.
Along from Helicopters Otago, the blokes using the Taieri Blokes Shed are interested in planes of a different sort.
In fact so many are interested in using the shed's tools and machinery that group chairman Ian Miller is in today readying a new, bigger, building, again leased from the aeroclub, for the group.
- Nick Bosma
