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Aircraft engineer John Edmonds at the Dannevirke Armistice Commemoration.

Among those who attended the Dannevirke Armistice Commemoration was John Edmonds, dressed in full Royal New Zealand Air Force uniform with an array of medals.

John grew up in Dannevirke and has a 23-year history of service with the RNZAF, which began after he left Dannevirke High School in 1988 and joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force to train as an aircraft engineer at Woodburn.

Having completed his senior trade training, he was based at Ohakea and Whenuapai where his job was the maintenance of the C130 Hercules and Boing 727 aircraft.

This required him to accompany these aircraft on their missions and his travel of the world began.

One of John’s earliest experiences was to be loaned to the Deep Freeze Operation running from Christchurch to Antarctica, where he helped load and unload American Starlifter aircraft.

He said this was an amazing experience, walking outside in broad daylight at 2am in -20C on a good day and -40C with windchill. He said experiencing the places of Scott, Hilary and Shackleton was especially amazing.

John visited Antarcticaseveral times and said he was always overwhelmed by its beauty.

By contrast, he also visited places where the temperatures were the other extreme – places of war where the Hercules were deliverers of vital supplies often at night.

These included East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq, flying to the latter from Pakistan and Dubai where summer temperatures were 55C and 63C on the tarmac.

John said some of these missions were dangerous, one of the missions being very soon after 9/11.

Sometimes the cargo was human. In 2003 it was New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark who was taken from Dubai to both Iraq and Afghanistan for brief visits to meet the troops.

Around that mission, the Hercules also flew out of Dubai to Scotland to support Orion aircraft on manoeuvres.

Missions were not always about military support, sometimes it was humanitarian. The tsunami emergencies in Samoa and Tonga in 2009 required urgent supplies to be sent from New Zealand.

John retired from the RNZAF in 2011 and now works in Dannevirke’s PGG Wrightson’s Store.

He attended the Armistice Day service partly because of his armed forces experience, but also because his uncle was killed in World War II.

Dave Murdoch is a part-time photo-journalist working for the Bush Telegraph and based at Dannevirke. He has covered any community story telling good news about the district for the last 10 years.