Coast owned and operated

Press, 15 June 1978, Page 20

Coast owned and operated

Suggest to Bert Waghorn. the head of Coast Air Charter Ltd, that he is a self-made man at 39, and he'll just give a hearty laugh and tell you he was a self-made man at 17. At that age he had decided not to continue on his father’s farm at Boatmans and was operating his own coal-mine. Where early pioneers carved roads through the bush, many of the present generation of West Coasters have taken enthusiastically to the air, and are carving their highways in the sky. Bert Waghorn and his five fellow directors are part of this tradition. Waghorn had an earthmoving business when he decided to learn to fly. Machine parts were hard to get, so he decided to fly over to Canterbury and get his own. The earth-moving bit is behind him now, but he still owns a successful coal-mine and is the area’s biggest private producer. Hie mine is at Burke’s Creek, four miles out of Reefton, where six men take out 250 tonnes of clean-burning bituminous coal per week. The mine has been there for 15 years and Waghorn has owned it for three. The previous owners went bankrupt. Waghorn feels that his knowledge of machinery has helped him to make the mine successful, and he has had state mine administrators come to him for ideas on mining equipment. The coal from Burke’s Creek supplys, among others, Queen Mary Hospital at Hanmer, Reefton Hospital, the State Forest at Golden Downs, Lincoln College and the University of Canterbury. Coast Air Charter, Ltd, has existed for six years and was formerly called Westland Air, Ltd, with Bert Waghorn as partowner. Now Waghorn is the head of two air charter companies which have loosely combined for the benefit of both — they are Air Charter and Alpine Enterprises. The other five

directors are Messrs M. J. Rosanowski, P. Melzer, I Wilson, J. Royds and V. Al born. All the men are locals, some of them born in Reefton, except for Phil Melzer who flies the company’s helicopter, a threeseater Hiller 12E, and is a former American army helicopter pilot. He now specialises in live deer recovery. Melzer was also a Hughes Corporation testpilot, (“Which will show you how good he is,” says Waghorn,) and has flown for 13,000 hours. Another specialist in the team is Vi 6 Alborn who does all the day-to-day maintenance on the firm’s planes. He is a fully-quali-fied aircraft engineer and one of the few men in New Zealand who is qualified to assemble helicopters. Coast Air and associates have four fixed-wing planes, all Cessnas, one seven-seater and three four-seaters. They have three full-time pilots and are the only commercial helicopter company, of the four operating in Westland, to have fixed-wing planes in their fleet as well. The main bases for the aircraft are at Hokitika and Reefton, with less activity at Greymouth and Westport. The company use the commercial airports in these places, and as well, i>ert Waghorn has his own strip at Cronadun and a helicopter pad beside the Inangahua River at Reefton. The activities of the combined companies are many and varied. Company pilots pick up safari passengers at both Christchurch and Auckland airports, and their clients include tourists, mountain-

eers, hunters and fishermen. Coast Air fly Lands and Survey Department staff on aerial photography trips, in planes that have special camera hatches for vertical shots, and position huts and do food drops for the Forestry Service. Coast Air is obviously going places and taking a lot of satisfied passengers with them. Their biggest customer is the West Coast Hospital Board. Two hundred patients are ferried over th° Alps every

year in planes specially equipped for the job, at half the cost of an ambulance. They do the trip in three quarterszor an hour. This air-ambulance section of Coast Air operates all over New Zealand. In the future, says Waghorn, the company hopes to buy a $150,000 jet-heli-copter for hunting safaris. The need is already there. “Our company is fully Coast-owned and operated,” he says. “We are here to develop the area, using Coast money and initiative.”