The weather on Tuesday was epic! Blue Skies, sunny, smooth flying and fantastic visibility. It made a very welcome change to having my flights cancelled for a fourth day in a row, and enabled a couple of us to plan a nav trip encompassing the four main volcanoes on the North Island, Tongariro, Ngaruahoe (Mt Doom in Lord of the Ring's), Ruapehu and Taranaki, as well as landing at some further afield airports. I won't bore you any longer and as I will dedicate the rest of this post to pictures from this incredible trip.
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| The spidertracks GPS log of our adventure |
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| Tongariro National Park in the distance |
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| Approaching Taupo town |
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| Lake Taupo and Mt Ruapehu |
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| The view across Lake Taupo |
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| Helicopter leaving Taupo over the lake |
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| On final for Taupo Airport |
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| Laving Taupo with the Volcanoes in front of us |
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| Lake Taupo |
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| The volcanoes |
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| The Volcanoes |
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| Tongariro steaming away |
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| Mt Ngaruahoe (Mt Doom) and Mt Ruapehu to the right |
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| Looking back at Mt Ngaruahoe |
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| Passing Mt Ruapehu |
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| Mt Taranaki poking out of the clouds 100 miles away |
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| Mt Ruapehu |
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| Descending through a large gap in the cloud |
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| The desolate Sanson Region |
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| Circuits over the sea for approach into Wanganui airport |
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| Wanganui Airport |
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| Mt Taranaki |
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| Final for New Plymouth Airport |
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| Departure from New Plymouth |
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| Sunset from 7500ft |
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| The very last rays of sunshine |
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| Just make out Mt Ruapehu in the distance, taken at 7500ft off the west coast |
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| The west coast at dusk |
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| Hamilton City at night |
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| Landing at Hamilton in the dark |
Great photos! Enjoying your story. Keep them coming :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks very much.
DeleteHi Chris, nice photos. is that instructor sitting beside you ? and at the end of NZ trip would you be able to rent out a plane here in UK and fly solo?
ReplyDeleteYes there was an instructor with us for this trip. Unfortunately because I am doing an MPL course I do not get single pilot privileges. This means I can only operate as part of a crew. However there are ways of getting single pilot privileges to enable me to do that.
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