It was just after the World War 2 when two young pilots took shovels and spades and began hacking out a landing strip from the bush at Milford Sound.
They were tired of the sea upsetting their beach landings and wanted a more reliable place to put down their Austers full of Australian, South African and American tourists and "tucker" for the isolated hotel in the sound.
In those days, there was no road to the jewel in New Zealand's tourist crown.
Tourists could walk there via the Milford Track; they could take a long boat ride around the coast or they could pack themselves into an Auster at dawn and slip through the mountains from Queenstown or Mossburn, three at a time.
One of those pilots was the late but legendary Popeye Lucas.
The other was Russell Troon (76), of Rolleston, who still remembers the peace and quiet of Milford Sound.
"You could sit on the end of the landing strip and catch a cod. It was very quiet."
Mr Troon recalls the sandflies and the year he spent spraying diesel and DDT over Sandfly Point, Sandfly Bay and around the hotel in the hope of getting rid of them.
Sixty years on, the sandflies are still there and still a nuisance.
Those who have followed in Mr Troon's flight path have also become a nuisance, according to Department of Conservation tourist surveys.
The one or two flights per week in the late 40s have become 200 flights per day in the peak of the summer tourist season and sometimes there can be 44 aircraft movements in an hour.
The problem is that these flights cross areas in the Fiordland National Park where visitors have "higher expectations of natural quiet and solitude".
Doc visitor monitoring officer Michael Harbrow, in a May 2007 report, noted that in one study, 51% of Milford Track walkers were annoyed by aircraft, although there was a question over the survey's scientific "rigour".
He recommended that the department set a limit on the number of visitors who could be annoyed by aircraft.
He suggested 25%, or one visitor in four.
He surveyed six Fiordland sites and found levels of aircraft activity were "acceptable" on the Milford Track and at Key Summit.
But more than 60% of visitors to the Homer Hut were annoyed by planes and helicopters, and in the Gertrude Valley, 36.7% were annoyed by helicopters and 30.2% by planes.
Generally, visitors annoyed by aircraft disliked helicopters more than planes.
The research reinforced the department's plan to curtail aircraft movements in the national park.
Its most controversial measure was the proposal to limit landings at Milford to 9496 per year and then offer, by tender, "packets" of landings to air operators.
The process was called the Milford Aerodrome Concession Allocation Process.
Twenty-three packets were offered.
Thirty-six operators tendered.
Each operator could apply for only one packet and there was no guarantee historical operators "would necessarily be granted back" their historical use.
Among those spoken to by the Otago Daily Times, however, there was an expectation that good, established operators who worked in with the department would not be disadvantaged by the process.
For Wanaka-based Aspiring Air, the Wakatipu Aero Club and several other long-standing Milford operators, it has not worked out like that.
Aspiring Air has lost all rights to land at Milford Sound and claims to have been devalued by $1 million.
The aero club has lost all rights and will be unable to continue training Milford pilots.
They and other operators claim the process was flawed and they are taking their case to the minister for conservation.
Their main complaint is that the system scored each applicant but then, in some cases, pitted high-scoring applicants against each other as, inadvertently, they bid for the same packet.
Aspiring Air, for example, with a score of 82.86%, applied for a packet of 219 landings.
Air Safaris with a score of 86.67% beat it to it.
But Milford Helicopters Ltd, with a score of 41.43%, bid successfully for the largest packet of all, 1770 landings per year.
Simon Spencer-Bower of Wanaka Helicopters says natural justice was not done.
"We've all believed that the highest-scoring operator would be rewarded."
He provided the ODT with minutes of a Southland Conservation Board meeting in 2007 where a Doc staff member was quoted as saying the formula was designed to reward the good operators.
Community relations manager for Doc in Southland Martin Kessick has consistently defended the system.
He says even though some operators had a lower score, they still met the minimum criteria to be granted a concession.
"You are always going to have some strong applicants who are going to miss out, simply because what they have applied for is more competitively fought over."
He says those who missed out can have their case reconsidered and nothing will be finalised until after a public hearing next year.
