The Home of CP16

The Joys of Flying

The last week has been a busy one. We have all been flying nearly every day since gaining our PPLs and are well in to the cross country stage of our flying, allowing us to see more of the spectacular scenery that New Zealand has to offer. The week ahead looks like it's going to be a busy one with a trip to the South Island planned for John, Tony and Phil next weekend. When we said goodbye to Ardmore Airfield just over one month ago, we didn't think that we would see it again. How wrong could we be?! All the scheduled maintenance is still carried out at Flightline Maintenance at Ardmore so a lot of our cross country flights involve a stop there to drop off one Katana and pick up another, well.......... thats if it's ready on time. I'm sure John enjoyed his 4 hour wait, while the engineers worked out why oil started to leak out of the engine casing shortly after the engine was started. It was a brand new engine too!

Morgan is walking around with a smile on his face again and so is Jo(e), its been a while since we saw that :-) Our enthusiastic cooking attempts every night have gradually ended and been replaced by take away and restaurants. No wonder our airline allowance is dissapearing so quickly. The Outback Inn and The Bank have been regularly attended too, although the high percentage of underage girls being allowed in is slightly worrying. Drink is cheap and Chartreuse is quickly becoming the shot of choice. If you ever get a chance, try a 'Backdraft', it's quite nasty!

The next 2 weeks are going to be hard work flying as much as possible and finishing off the groundschool in between. We return to the UK on 26th November. See you all soon.

Congratulations!

Well, they say good things come in threes and it seems that this is the case with CP16 as Morgan passed his PPL today. It was a bit of a shock as he only found out 3 hours before hand that he was due to do it but he didn't let this faze him and pulled out a sterling performance that even Chuck Yeager would have been proud of!

Well done mate!

Congratulations!

Well done to Andy for passing his New Zealand PPL Skills Test today. It almost went a bit 'Pete Tong' as SFB decided to not want to start. Luckily, Andy managed to get the engine to splutter in to life on the 4th attempt and then taxied out to the runway holding point, despite the flat nose tire! ;-)

Congratulations!

Congratulations go to Nik who passed his New Zealand PPL Skills Test today!

Latest stuff

Well that's us safely down in Hamilton and so far we have all been impressed, particularly the members of CP16 (who shall remain nameless) that decided to try out some of the local liquors. We are not sure if there was an accent problem or they deliberately asked for the 'Jalapeno' version of 'chartreuse' -quite possibly the hottest, most vile drink that has ever had the misfortune of being discovered. Recovery was slow, painful and involved around 8 gallons of water.

The town itself has pretty much everything we could hope for along with the advantage that we stay 15 minutes (sober) walk from the town centre so gone are the days of haggling with taxi drivers. We are not sure though what the locals will be thinking with 50 or so Brits, and an Irishman, being dumped on their door step but so far so good. There are 45000 students in Hamilton so we reckon we will fit in just nicely!!

The infamous Henry the cat was allowed to join us down here on one condition... he get's neutered. As we type this, the poor little cretin is on a vet's table somewhere getting his bits removed. Ouch!!

On a completely different note, well done to John, Tony and Phil who all passed their New Zealand Private Pilot's Licences in the past week or so. Hopefully it won't be long before the Long Course Legends do the same.

Look out for some new photos of Hamilton in the next week or so.

The Move to Hamilton

The day many of us had been dreading finally came and it was time to pack our bags, take down our cool posters and clean the chalets. With the hard work out of the way, a final BK was shared by the Scots and Legends around the coffee table before Nik, Phil, Andy and Tony set off on the epic journey South. Morgan and John remained behind because they had eaten far too many pies and couldn't fit in the cars, so two trips were necessary.

The reception at Hamilton was surprisingly good - Billie had arranged emergency rations and the rooms were large, clean and well-equipped. Phil and Nik got their rooms and unpacked, while Tony and Andy were told they 'may get their rooms at some point tonight'. Tony was given a temporary room and offered Andy some floorspace....a schoolboy error he will never repeat, since he was kept awake all night by Andy's tuneful growling. Meanwhile, Morgan and John were enjoying a 5-hour stint of utter boredom exacerbated by the munchies as they had no car, no food, no t.v., no internet...nothing. One of the instructors had promised to drop the car back at Takanini for John and Morgan, but took the the other instructors for a 2-hr coffee break in town before heading North to collect our deprived duo...they were a tad upset.

With the CP reunited, the allocation of TVs, Wireless Network cards and the astonishing appearance of two 50" Widescreen Rear Projection TVs, the day after the move was rather rosier then we could have imagined. CP16 were upbeat as we headed into town to the place where 'everyone gets a bargain', with many other CPs in hot pursuit. CTC cadets overran the peaceful settlement of Hamilton within minutes and chaos was destined to follow. In true form the Admiral and the Commodore (Ric and Ed from CP11) hosted the festivities with first class food and drinks for all....and by all I mean every Tom, Dick and Harry at every bar frequented by the admiralty that night. Credit card receipts indicate that NZ$1500 was spent between them in one night alone. Ouch! The Admiral's power naps gave him remarkable stamina, but it all caught up with him in the end... he was so severely incapacitated that the Commodore has to assume command for a full 24hrs.

CP16 are settling in well and will keep you posted on our latest adventures....

Last Days at Ardmore

The last day at Ardmore ended with an excellent barbeque New Zealand style. The backdrop for our BBQ was, of course, the house that burnt down behind us... The chef for the evening was 'handy Andy' who served up burgers and sausages and the charred, blackened remains of what appeared to be chickens. The only thing missing was some marshmallows!

After the BBQ we headed into Auckland for our last stand and our first and last visit to Coyote Ugly. The girls there are well worth a visit, they even take your pets dancing if you ask nicely! And after a certain incident with toilet paper, we 'routed' to Globe and spent the rest of the night charming the plain people of Auckland.

The next morning we paid dearly for our late night partying - we lost the position of the cleanest CP and with it any chance of another banana cake courtesy of Marz...

Birthday Stunts

What better way is there to spend your birthday than jumping off a bridge. Well, that's what Phil thought anyway. The prospect of the big quarter century was obviously too much for him so he decided to throw himself head-first off the 47 metres high Auckland Harbour Bridge. Fortunately, some bloke had tied a bungy chord round his ankles but it didn't stop him from getting wet!!

We will try and figure out if we can upload the video of his jump onto the site. Rumour has it that some of CP16 are considering doing New Zealand's largest bungy from the Nevis cable car (about 150 metres high) so we may get some interesting photos from that one!

Duck Tales

Here's a story of one man, his aeroplane, a field and 2 farmyard animals.

When Nik set off on this epic journey with Danielle he was unaware of his fate that sunny afternoon. Everything was going swimmingly in the lesson on Precautionary Landings which basically entails picking a field to land in if the weather gets bad.

So, there he was, our hero, bumbling along when Danielle says the weather has deteriorated and Nik, being a fantastic pilot, knew exactly what to do...

HASELLL checks, 75 knots 1 stage of flap etc etc etc zzzzz....

The next thing to do is find a field. Now, in New Zealand there are lots and lots of them. The main problem is that finding a flat one can be a bit tricky. Anyway, Nik sees one that looks ideal except for the dark specs dotted around it.

'What could they be Nik?' Says Danielle.

The reply from our intrepid aviator was not the expected one.

'Ducks' he says, confident that they would fly away when he approached.

Now we would like to know what was going through Danielle's mind at this point, bearing in mind that she could see what they actually were and also that it's difficult to see a person from that height, never mind a flock of water fowl. We assume she thought that he was joking as she decided to allow the descent to continue.

Down to 500ft and Nik gets a bit of a shock. What had seemed like harmless ducks from 900ft had miraculously turned into New Zealand's largest herd of 'Brown Swiss' cows.

We would like to point out that one of these cows probably weighs more than a Katana, our trusty steed and would have made a bit of a mess had Nik actually needed to land there.

For future reference we have decided to post two pictures here just in case Nik ever finds himself in a similar situation and there is no confusion.

COW

DUCK

Latest News

Well Ladies and Gents, it's been a while since our last update so we thought it was about time we let you know about our latest goings on.

We'll start with the big news from today. It seems that we will be leaving Auckland a lot sooner than we thought. We were all called in for an urgent meeting (some of us were in the air at the time and got a 'land now' radio call) so we knew something important was brewing. It seems that there is a problem with the lease renewal on our accomodation so the decision has been made to move to Hamilton sooner rather than later.

'How soon??' We hear you ask....

3 weeks and counting is the answer! The weekend of the 8th and 9th of October has been set in stone as the big move days so we don't have too long to get ourselves organised. Hopefully there won't be too many teething problems although we all reckon there will be some. For starters, there is going to be an instructor shortage as they got as much notice as we did! We are moving into new 'Halls of Residence' type accomodation which will ruin our (in)famous meal times a bit as we will be sharing cooking facilities with another 14 or so people!

On the flying front we are all getting on at a decent rate with the short course Scots just about ready for their New Zealand PPL tests. Hopefully they will be finished in the next week or so. The Long Course Losers...I mean Legends (guess who's writing this!) are not too far behind so hopefully they will get them finished before the big move.

The other business news is that we have finally been given rostered days off. Now we know a month the days we will definately not be flying so hopefully it'll give us the opportunity to organise some sort of road trip. Stayed tuned for details.

On the rumour front, some members of the course have apparently joined 'Ray's Gym'. Now surely that has nothing to do with a newfound love interest and the need to shed those love handles??

Well folks we can't think of anything else to add, 'Friends' is just starting and our own Gordon Ramsey (aka Nik) is preparing another culinary delight so it's time to sign off.

Don't be shy now folks and give us some comments as we get bored of talking to each other all the time.