Jim Eagles: Off to a flying start

These days, flying to Australia is probably more common than flying to the South Island, and it's often quicker and cheaper as well.

So it comes as something of a surprise to be reminded that scheduled transtasman air services are a relatively recent phenomenon.

The first such service began almost exactly 65 years ago, when the TEAL (Tasman Empire Airways Ltd) flying boat Aotearoa took off from the Waitemata Harbour at 6.30am with 10 passengers and 41,000 pieces of mail on board.

Nine hours later the plane touched down on Sydney Harbour.

That wasn't the first commercial flight to this country. Neil Rennie's book, Conquering Isolation, The First 50 Years Of Air New Zealand (published by Heinemann Reed in 1990) recalls that commercial flights began three years earlier.

In March 1937, the Sikorsky flying boat Pan American Clipper II flown by Captain Edwin Musick landed in Auckland after flying from San Francisco via Samoa for a route survey.

The Government gave Pan American landing rights in Auckland and on December 26, 1937 Captain Musick was back, flying the first scheduled international air service to New Zealand.

Just one day later, Imperial Airways' Short Empire flying boat Centaurus landed on the Waitemata Harbour, with New Zealander Captain John Burgess at the controls, having completed the first survey of the boat route from England to Australia and New Zealand.

But the first transtasman service was the biggie. It launched what is now Air New Zealand and strengthened links with our nearest neighbour, most popular tourist destination and biggest market. So the new service was immediately popular and within two months went from one return trip a week to three a fortnight and, after a couple of years, to three a week.

Even so, it took TEAL more than four years to clock up 1000 Tasman crossings. By contrast, Air New Zealand now clocks that up every 20 days.

These days, 2.2 million passengers a year fly the Tasman. Many businesspeople go over and back in a day.

But before 1940 a business trip to Sydney involved a couple of weeks steaming across some of the roughest seas in the world.

And even when the scheduled air service started, the trip was still an adventure and passengers often staggered off after a long, turbulent ride.

I'm not quite old enough to have flown on the TEAL flying boats but 40 years ago I did go to Fiji as a passenger on an RNZAF Sunderland flying boat.

We took off from the old Hobsonville Air Base and landed many hours later at Lauthala Bay, not far outside Suva.

It was a thrilling journey for a young journalist but also an extraordinarily uncomfortable one - we needed warm clothes, ear muffs, a thermos flask and a cushion to cope with the cold, noise, turbulence and vibration.

I may sometimes grumble about modern flights - most recently on an Air New Zealand trip to Singapore where the service was slack, to say the least - but compared with the early flying-boat service, modern aviation is cruisy.

The original transtasman air service usually took around nine hours because the old Empire flying boat had a cruising speed of 236km/h. Today, Air New Zealand reckons on a flight time between Auckland and Sydney of three hours and its fleet of Airbus or Boeing jets have a cruising speed of 800-900km/h.

While the old flying boats had a maximum of 19 passengers, depending on conditions, a modern aircraft such as the Boeing 747-400 carries 392, though sometimes that's a mixed blessing.

And while modern passengers may occasionally feel a few bumps as they cruise at 10,000m the flying boats operated at more like 1500m and regularly ran into significant turbulence.

Perhaps best of all, a transtasman flight is much cheaper these days. The one-way fare in 1940 was 28 (equivalent to 30 days' pay at the average wage) while today an every day smart saver costs $139 (or about one day's average wage).

All of that makes Australia - and the world - accessible to us in a way previous generations of New Zealanders would never have thought possible.

Marking the 65th anniversary of that first flight, Air New Zealand chief executive Ralph Norris said, "For a country so far away from the rest of the world, air travel opened up a whole range of new possibilities for businesspeople, holidaymakers, friends and family.

"The ability to catch a flight is something we never think about twice but it's important to remember all the work that was done in those early years to establish a regular, sustainable airline for this country."

Good point.