The letter from Australia is a weekly newsletter from our office in Australia. Sign up to receive it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter based in Melbourne.
The other week, some 32 years into my career as an experienced flyer, I experienced air travel as if for the first time – the flight of angels, of billionaires, of dreams. (He was still in the coaching class.)
On a recent reporting trip to New Zealand, I arranged to spend the weekend visiting an old friend who now lives near Havelock, a town of about 600 at the top of the country’s South Island, about 50 miles west of Wellington, where he was traveling from.
With the Cook Strait between New Zealand’s North and South Islands in the way, the easiest option was to take a domestic flight — one of hundreds that zip across the country every day.
Flying domestically in New Zealand is marginally stricter than boarding a bus. If you have no luggage to check in, you can walk through the airport doors half an hour before your flight departs. No one will check your ID at any point, and you don’t even need to show your boarding pass to get through security, which usually takes a minute or two, with no liquid limits. At some smaller airports, there is no security at all.
To get to Havelock, I booked a seat on a flight operated not by Air New Zealand, the national airline, but by Sounds Air, one of the country’s much smaller “regional carriers”, of which there are about half a dozen.
Departing Sounds Air from Wellington, you skip security screenings entirely. Your boarding pass is little more than a reusable piece of green laminated paper that says ‘Blenheim Boarding Pass’. Bag check? They put it in the back of the nine-seater plane. And don’t bother going to the carousel upon arrival. It will be delivered to you once you get off.
The lack of risk is entirely intentional, with some frequent flyers buying 10-journey tickets for regular strait hops, said Andrew Crawford, the airline’s chief executive.
“That’s our point of difference,” he said. “People like that.”
The airline was founded in 1986, with a nine-seater Cessna Caravan that ferried people to the Marlborough Sounds. It now has 10 planes – the largest of their craft has 12 seats – and carries around 120,000 people a year, mostly on routes where there is no other alternative but the road.
Some passengers are commuters. Others are tourists. And then there are those who live in rural areas and need specialized medical care in larger cities. “If you’re going in for cancer treatment or day surgery, things like that,” he said. “That’s a big part of our business.”
These small airlines play a critical role in helping New Zealanders get around a country that has an extremely limited rail network and where many people live far from essential services.
But it was the flight itself that captivated me.
Under normal circumstances, elbow to elbow with strangers, the grandeur of flight is somewhat displaced by the discomfort of being inside a pressurized metal tube, and you easily forget that you are thousands of feet in the air. (Some people prefer to forget this.)
But at about 6,500 feet, low and slow enough to see wind turbines and craggy hills unfold before us, as if we were flying in a dream, the miracle of flight seemed unusually … miraculous.
The wind blew through the cabin, and I could see into the cockpit, over the solo pilot’s shoulder, and out the windshield. As we came inland through the vineyards the area is known for, the grapes were almost visible on the vine. It wasn’t hard to imagine myself as some kind of early aviator, and I tried to keep a smile off my face.
All in all, I told my waiting host, it was an experience exactly halfway between driving a minivan and traveling by private jet.
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