Bomb detector dog Toby and his handler Andrew Buchanan have "put Queenstown on the map" with their success in a national competition to find the country’s top sniffer dogs. The Queenstown-based pair entered the National Police Patrol and Detector Dog Championships earlier this year as underdogs from the Aviation Security Service (Avsec), to challenge other explosives detection duos from across the country.
Mr Buchanan (53), of Cromwell, who has competed in the competition twice before with other dogs, said Toby has "just got it".
"I know how stressful it is ... we’ve only been operational for about one year," Mr Buchanan said.
"The more and more you get out there and you do more training and go into high-risk areas, your dog gets better and better.
"So, you’re looking for that dog that has that one X-factor."You’re going up with the best of the best, the police are doing it, Customs are doing it."
Mr Buchanan said finishing in second place at the Upper Hutt event was "one of the highlights" of his year.
Toby, a 3-year-old German short-haired pointer and Labrador-cross, was one of three puppies Mr Buchanan had the choice of working with and training from scratch.
He took an early shine to his canine companion and the duo have gone on to show just how good they are at working together to sniff out danger.
The competition saw contenders take on a variety of search tasks, including dealing with a fake bomb threat in a car park and searching a quarry and theatre for explosives. Mr Buchanan said some of the tasks were like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
He and Toby faced challenges they would not normally take on or train for with Avsec, which many of the army or police dogs were better accustomed to. Starting out in the job 14 years ago, he said he has come to "build up a great rapport" with dogs by taking a hands-on approach.
"We are fighting against people who are wanting to disrupt the travel of the public, so we need to just be one step ahead and train for whatever they are going to throw at us."
Queenstown’s Avsec team is based in a building next to Queenstown Airport, which backs on the runway.
Avsec officers often use land around the site to train their detector dogs to get them used to different terrain and scenarios.
With the resort’s visitor population on the rise and increasing number of flights at Queenstown Airport, Mr Buchanan said this presented an "increased risk" and demonstrated the need for an explosives detection team stationed nearby.
The airport has had a 33% increase in passenger numbers since 2015, 2,140,669 in the year ending June 2018, up 13% on the previous year.
International passenger numbers were up 12% to 596,276 and domestic passenger numbers rose by 14% to 1,544,393 during the same period.
Queenstown Airport Corporation’s public consultation on its proposals to extend the airport’s noise boundaries to allow for 41,600 flights a year by 2045, and double passenger numbers to 5.1 million, showed only about 4% of almost 1500 survey respondents backed the plans.
Mr Buchanan, who used to work for Avsec in Auckland, said "Queenstown is starting to get busy".
"We get called to unattended bags, dark alarms ... and do a lot of proactives, so now people are starting to realise who we are."
He said with "what is going on around the world’ and "all the VIPs starting to fly straight into Queenstown", this presented a greater risk.
He referred to a recent bomb threat in Melbourne and a bomb scare in Queenstown in 2016, when a note about a bomb was found on a plane that arrived in the resort from Sydney.
Mr Buchanan said, "We got in, we searched the plane, we searched the whole of the airport and we had everyone back in there within 35 minutes, so that’s what dogs can do.
"I wasn’t on that day because I was on standby. Because Queenstown has never had a bomb threat, it was one of those things that’s like trial and error.
"There was a lot of communication that needed to be done and obviously that brought a lot of stuff out to highlight the need for communication with the police and all the agencies.
"We had this big meeting and now we have got something in place."
Security was beefed up in Queenstown when the Five Eyes intelligence group — made up of top spies and intelligence leaders from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada — met in Arrowtown last year.
Leading politicians and other high-profile visitors have also made their way to the resort in recent years, including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2014.
Queenstown’s Avsec team has grown to become an integral part of maintaining safety at the airport as the resort continues to attract more visitors.
Mr Buchanan said three new recruits have just arrived from college to be trained to join the team and emphasised the importance of them gaining vital experience needed on the job.
"When you go out to a bomb threat, you are working with the best.
"You are just another tool in the fight against terrorism, so you need to be switched on.
"We are constantly just training. It’s a team effort."
