Link With Flying.

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31365, 10 May 1967, Page 24

Link With Flying.

After the late Sir Charles Kingsford Smith made his epic-making flight across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand in 1928 he flew from Blenheim on his return crossing. , The paddock that the famous old Fokker aeroplane, Southern Cross, took off from was on the property of the father and uncle of the president of the New Zealand Ploughing Association, Mr E. A. E. Fairhall, at Renwick. The paddock was 212 acres in area and Mr Fairhall remembers that part of the fence into another 170-acre paddock

was removed just in case the Southern Cross needed a longer runway for take off. This turned out to be unnecessary. Today all but 20 acres of these two paddocks make up the Woodbourne Aerodrome. The land was taken over at the beginning of World War 11. Mr Fairhall ploughed all of this land when it was still part of the family property and It was to this area that visitors used to come in earlier days to admire the straightness and neatness of the ploughing of his father, the late Mr Louis Fairhall.