It sounds like something out of a riddle book, but a 1965 Air New Zealand Douglas DC-8-50 has been obtained by Wanaka’s National Transport and Toy Museum and will be returning home this year.
Three more pieces of New Zealand airline industry history are also close to being bought.
It has taken museum owner Jason Rhodes seven years of legal to and fro, financial investment and trips to Brazil to lock in a deal and grab the title of the former passenger aeroplane, which carried over 1million passengers in its day.
Now a broken-down freighter, it sits at the Manous Airport in Brazil and was only months off being cut up and turned into scrap metal.
To save it from ruin, Mr Rhodes and his tireless research team found it, and bought it off its owner — bypassing a company that owns a larger fleet and has gone into liquidation.
"We have ownership of that one. We have worked hard for seven years to obtain that."
He and a team have started a "Bring Our Bird Home" campaign to call for donations to relocate the Douglas, plus three more former Air NZ carriers: a Teal/Air New Zealand L-188 Electra, an NAC Air New Zealand Boeing 737 and an Air New Zealand DC-10. They are located in Brazil, Alaska, North Carolina and Cuba respectively.
Mr Rhodes said the process has been a tough one, having to speak to United States, Brazil and New Zealand embassies and government departments, but the planes were pieces of history that should not be in the scrapheap.
"It is all part of our history — they opened our market. Previous to them a trip to New Zealand took days. This opened New Zealand tourism up like we had never imagined. They have carried over 1million people, [including] the Queen and the Beatles."
The process of finding and extracting the planes and relocating them to New Zealand was estimated to cost over $1 million each.
The Douglas DC-8-50 he has secured came into service in 1965 and left New Zealand shores in 1981. He hunted it down by following the registration from the time it left.
Having sat near the Amazon forest for some time, the plane is covered in soot from the forest fires and has a completely different paint job to its former teal-coloured one.
Once it is cleaned up, shipped and goes through New Zealand’s biosecurity system, it will be carried from Timaru to Wanaka and painted on the outside and seated out on the inside.
"We will have a whole band of people involved.
"From a mechanical point of view everything is complete — all the gauges, the pilot seat intact."
The 737 was New Zealand’s first to came into service, he said.
He said while it was tough raising funds for the project, he believed there would be many New Zealanders who would benefit from the planes’ return home.
"They are all walks of life. Some it is just they may have flown the plane, or their parents were air hostesses, or their father may have flown."
"We have nothing like this in New Zealand. This is why we have started this process."
