Dave Gee: Life from Right Field

After being safely back in Dunedin for a few days, the boss decided to fly us over to Franz Josef on Friday to cover the discovery of a local chap who'd been missing for around five days. We flew over in a nice little fixed wing Piper Senica III.

Great scenic flight on our way over there... especially when we got to fly up and over the Mt Cook area.

The only bad part of the flight was when we came to land... the brakes locked up as were coming down to land, meaning we skidded off to the left of the runway and ended up parked in a grassy area... Luckily our pilot (Bruce) managed to hold the plane up enough so the propellor's didn't hit the ground as we were skidding in to stop.

We were all fine, so headed off into Franz Josef to carry on with our story, while they flew in an engineer from Greymouth to replace the left wheel, wheel strut, and some hopefully-not-very-important piece of metal from underneath the plane ;-)

Once it was all fixed mid-afternoon, we flew up to Greymouth for another interview and to feed our pics out, then had a slightly-less-relaxed flight back home to Dunedin again... A bit of excitement anyway...!