Kāpiti Aeromodellers Club: Where vintage meets modern in model aviation

Operating a model aeroplane requires skill and awareness. Photo / Roger Smith

Nestled in Queen Elizabeth Park is the home of the Kāpiti Aeromodellers Club.

The club, which was formally registered as a not-for-profit incorporated society in 1995, has a long-term lease from the Greater Wellington Regional Council.

It has its own specific area which comprises a clubhouse and a regularly mowed grass airstrip of about 100m in length and 30m wide.

Club members are active on any given day depending on favourable weather conditions.

“Generally if it’s a fine day, and the wind is all right, there will be someone there,” club president John Pfahlert said.

Weekends are the most popular for flying, and the annual rally, normally on the third weekend in March, which sees people converge from other clubs, is a drawcard.

A model aeroplane above Queen Elizabeth Park. Photo / Roger Smith

A wide range of aircraft are operated from vintage gull-wing planes, small almost-ready-to-fly electric-powered foam planes, ordinary sport models to turbine jets, and more.

Back in the day, diesel engines were used, before moving to methanol engines, and now petrol motors and electric motors are the go-to.

To become an aeromodeller pilot, you have to learn how to fly a model plane and undergo a flight examination before a licence is granted for a registered airstrip.

The club has about 110 members with a strong culture around health and safety.

There are various protocols to abide by before take-off such as being careful when starting motors and not taxiing through the pit area.

And rules to follow during take off, in the air, and landing, a lot of which are regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority through the aeromodellers’ national body Model Flying New Zealand.

Members must keep their aircraft visible at all times and can’t fly them above 600 feet.

The club has a hazard designation around its flying field to warn full-size planes from Kāpiti Coast Airport that it’s there; aeromodellers need to keep an eye out too.

Often they’re assisted by an observer making sure there’s nothing else in the sky, or helping ensure no mishaps if other radio control planes are operating at the same time.

A super-quick model plane. Photo / Roger Smith

An eye needs to be kept out for people using a nearby shared pathway too.

“There’s always a degree of nervousness when you open up the throttle and thunder it down the runway because once it hits airspeed, you’re effectively committed.

“If you take the power off you’re going to run into a fence or sand dunes, or if the engine stops on take-off for whatever reason, you’ll crash and damage the plane.

“You have to be fully focused on the orientation of the plane, in the sky, and making sure you don’t lose your memory of what its orientation is particularly during aerobatic manoeuvres.

“And when you’re bringing it into land, the control sticks are in the opposite direction, as it comes towards you.

“The landing is probably the more complicated thing because you can clip a wing on the ground or bounce the plane.

“Most of us would fly our planes on a tank of fuel for eight to 10 minutes and then land.

“You might have half a dozen flights and then go home or stay the whole day.”

John has had an interest in radio-controlled planes for a long time.

“I started flying control-line planes when I was about 10.

“You sat it on the ground, started the engine, let it go, and it would go around in a circle.

“The only thing you could do with it was make it go up and down.

“Before the advent of radio-control flying, there was that sort of flying, and free flight flying planes, where you’d wind up rubber bands and launch them into the air, or you’d have little diesel engines that had a 10-second motor run, with the objective of getting them to stay in the air for two minutes before a timer flicked the tailplane up, and they came down again.

A model plane goes through its paces. Photo / Roger Smith

“There’s still a large following of people who build those types of planes but not in our club.”

Later in life, when his children had grown up, John returned to his interest in model planes.

He’s got vintage planes, gliders, sport aerobatics, warbirds, and so on.

“I’ve got a whole mix of planes.”

The hobby can become a bit addictive too.

“I met an elderly gentleman who said he had 92 planes stacked up in his shed.”

There were a variety of reasons for his interest.

“As a retired individual it’s something to do, it’s entertaining, and you mix with others with a similar age and interest.”