Air Milford are set to acquire a near new Cessna Caravan. Antony Sproull, Air Milford's operations manager, along with two other ferry pilots, will fly the Caravan via the Greek Islands, Egypt, across the Red Sea via Saudi Arabia to Southern Oman, the Maldives and Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean. From there they will fly to Broome, Western Australia, on to Alice Springs and land in Queenstown in mid-January. Their journey will be live tracked through the Air Milford website (see http://www.airmilford.co.nz/blog/)
Originally the Greek registered Caravan, SX-SKV, was to have arrived in November but due to unforeseen reasons, the purchase was delayed.
The Caravan has 300 hours on the clock and comes with state-of-the-art cockpit technology - the first of its kind to be operated between Queenstown and Milford Sound. The plane's Garmin G1000 GPS instrument technology meant Air Milford had the potential to operate commercially into Milford on instrument flight rules (IFR), enabling flights to continue in bad weather.
Didn't know Milford had a GPS approach.
ReplyDeleteQueenstown is enough of a circus as it is without the bugsmashers flying around IFR.
Agreed. Would they let down out at sea and then fly visual through the fiord? Would be high MSA's need a lot of fuel, also for non GPS alternates (Manapouri, Invercargill or back to Queenstown?)
ReplyDeleteMilford was IFR for years, had one of the first, (if not the first) gps approaches in NZ
ReplyDeleteIFR into Milford? No thanks!
ReplyDeleteFirst GPS approach was Tokoroa. Having seen the performance of some of the QN VFR pilots lately, I'd hate to see them flying IFR. Recipe for disaster if you ask me.
ReplyDelete