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Part 2: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air

If you have the time and money, a flying tour of the country is a great adventure and a true bucket list experience.

Exploring the mountains and fjords of New Zealand on a flying tour was the ultimate bucket list experience. [Courtesy: Sam Weigel]
Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • The author undertook a weeklong self-fly tour of New Zealand's South Island with FlyInn, experiencing intense and visually stunning flights through diverse landscapes.
  • The tour involved challenging mountain flying, including ridge-surfing techniques near Mount Cook and navigating variable weather, offering breathtaking views of fiords, glaciers, and alpine regions.
  • Experiences ranged from short-field landings in unconventional locations like a cow pasture and sheep paddock, to exploring coastal cities like Dunedin and visiting historic sites and a family ranch.
  • The author gained valuable mountain flying skills, obtained a New Zealand PPL validation, and wholeheartedly recommends the FlyInn tour as a "grand adventure" and "bucket list experience."
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When I left you hanging last month, dear reader, my wife and I and Kiwi flight instructor Matt McCaughan had just taken a Cessna 172 on a tight, slow flight circuit around a cloud-scraped, rock-walled thimble of an alpine lake in New Zealand, exiting with a rakish wingover down the enormous 2,000-foot waterfall cascading from its outlet. This was the fourth or fifth stunning sight in just the first two hours of a planned weeklong flying tour of the country’s South Island with FlyInn, McCaughan’s self-fly vacation operation.

Describing these two hours required three pages crammed with significantly more words than my usual monthly allotment, and yet I promised to cover the balance of the tour in a single additional installment.

Sam Weigel

Sam Weigel has been an airplane nut since an early age, and when he's not flying the Boeing 737 for work, he enjoys going low and slow in vintage taildraggers. He and his wife live west of Seattle, where they are building an aviation homestead on a private 2,400-foot grass airstrip.

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