Changes In 25 Years Of Service

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30738, 30 April 1965, Page 1

Changes In 25 Years Of Service

When the first regular Tasman air service began 25 years ago today, the single fare to Sydney was £3O. Today the trip can be made with Air New Zealand for only £4 7s more, and it takes five hours less—four hours by turbo-prop airliner compared with nine hours by the fly-ing-boats of 1940.

Air New Zealand —then Tasman Empire Airways, Ltd.— began its service on Apri’ 30, 1940, with the 200-mile-an-hour flying-boat Aotearoa, flying from Auckland to Sydney. The flight was preceded by a State dinner, and 10 passengers made the flight with Captain J. W. Burgess to Rose Bay, Sydney. More than 140 crossings were made in the first year, and on the first Christmas flight Miss K. Rogers, secretary to Kingsford Smith’s copilot, C. T. P. Ulm, cut the Christmas cake. Miss Rogers had been one of the first women passengers across the Tasman on December 4, 1933.

The 77,5711 b of mail carried in the first year of operations included a large number of air-mail letters for the New Zealand troops in the Middle East. By the time the Aotearoa was withdrawn from service in 1947 she had made 442 crossings, covering more than 1,000,000 miles. A sister plane was the Awarua. Four Sandringham - class flying-boats—the Tasman, Australia, New Zealand, and Auckland—came into service in 1946 and 1947. They were followed by five 45-passenger

Solents —Ararangi, Aotearoa 11, Awatere, Aranui, and Aparima. They were the last of the flying-boats.

In 1950 T.E.A.L. extended its service to include flights between Wellington and Sydney, Auckland and Fiji, and Wellington and the Chatham Islands. A year later it began flying to Tahiti from Auckland, by way of Fiji and the Cook Islands. In 1952 a service to Samoa was added. Soon afterwards, in 1954, T.E.A.L. began to use Douglas DC6 landplanes Aotearoa

111, Arawhata, and Arahia. They took their 56 passengers across the Tasman in five hours and a half. Three Lockheed Electra turbo-prop airlines were introduced in 1959, and they reduced the flight time to four hours. When the three DCB pure-jet aircraft ordered in 1963 arrive this year they will cross the Tasman in less than two hours and a half.

Another step forward for the airline is its right to fly to Hong Kong and the United States, granted in 1962.