It was a winter Sunday in 1983 above a seething Wellington sea when Robert Muldoon glanced up from The Economist magazine.
“Tell him to have another go,” the then prime minister told an RNZAF flight attendant as the old Andover aircraft’s two propellers struggled to haul into the clouds. The pilot had abandoned a second landing attempt against a rollicking gale. Rain stung the trembling fuselage like buckshot.
The ashen passengers, a mix of press and Muldoon’s staff, looked queasily at each other. None dared countermand the PM. As the hapless flight attendant conveyed the prime minister’s wish upfront, I imagine, the flight deck conversation went something like this: “He wants you to have another run at it, sir.”
“God, really? Then we’ll see how much the dear leader wants to keep his lunch down.”
The Andover lurched around for a third attempt. With winds gusting ever higher, it see-sawed violently downward. An overhead baggage locker cracked open, spewing its contents. A fire extinguisher tore off a wall, careening onto the floor, the noise terrifying everybody.
We landed crazily on one wheel and skewered down the sodden tarmac to a halt. Muldoon never looked up from his Economist.
Leaders have conflicted relationships with their VIP aircraft – treating them as a personal fiefdom but fearing public opprobrium when the time comes to spend money on replacements.
Like his predecessors, Christopher Luxon was loath to announce the replacement of the RNZAF’s current large and embarrassingly unreliable Boeing 757 passenger jets – now well over 30 years old – until last month’s Budget.
After David Lange came to power in 1984, one of his first acts was to commandeer an air force Boeing 727 jet, bought second-hand from United Airlines and by then 16 years old, and storm across Africa to apologise for New Zealand’s hosting in 1981 of the South African rugby team.
The aircraft had a limited range, forcing a highly circuitous route to Africa to allow for refuelling. Things soon went spectacularly awry. After refuelling in Melbourne the travelling party –including your correspondent – stopped in Perth for more gas ahead of the 727’s planned island hop across the Indian Ocean to Africa.
In Perth, Lange learnt the US government, still seething over his anti-nuclear ships policy, had rescinded approval for his aircraft to refuel at its military base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The Africa tour was in early jeopardy until a compromise was reached – Lange’s plane would be allowed to land but without journalists.
The gaggle of Kiwi reporters – whisked non-stop from Perth to Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, in a new Qantas 747 – were delighted to be on hand, well lunched, for Lange’s African arrival a day after their own.
Their cockiness was short lived. Apparently alarmed by the burden the travelling press placed on the aircraft’s alcohol supplies as Lange toured East Africa’s capitals, the air force cut the booze.
Other aerial dramas followed. Somewhere above Nigeria, the sight of three alarmed Nigerian air force pilots pounding the instrument cluster of the helicopter carrying the Lange party to a tea plantation preceded a rapid emergency landing.
The lumbering old air freighter the Nigerians sent to retrieve us developed an inflight leak of the toilet system – sending a river of stored effluent backwards down the aisle.
After arriving to work in Australia, I travelled on then prime minister Bob Hawke’s equally ancient Boeing 707 – known to the rowdy travelling press as the “zoo plane” where wine flowed while Hawke smoked cigars and played poker.
Doubtless the shiny new VIP aircraft ordered by Luxon will prove far more reliable – but nowhere near the fun.
