I had been watching the weather all day (in between various "OMG! my parents are coming, I'd better clean up the house"-type activities) and it looked like the nasty weather that was forecast to arrive from the North was going to hold off...
After they had settled in and had had some dinner, I asked them if they were keen to "go and see Auckland by night" ;)
We headed out to the airfield and after I pre-flighted LMA and had taxied to the pumps and back to top up the fuel we headed off into a relatively clear, calm evening at around 2230...
My dad is somewhat of a photography enthusiast (he used to do his own developing back in the day), so he has a slightly better grasp of how to work these fancy pants Digital SLR camera's... hence, instead of his nighttime photography looking like this shot I tried to take of the Marsden Point Oil Refinery a few weeks ago:
His shots ended up looking like this:
After whizzing about the sky tower a couple of times, we went for some sight-seeing over the rest of the city. LMA has 2 radios and I had been listening out on the NZAA frequencies and noted they were very quiet (as you would expect at 11pm on a Sunday ;)... so I thought I'd chance my arm and see if I could get M+D a treat and requested clearance to overhead the tower and then onwards to Ardmore via Karaka. I was cleared straight in, and as an added bonus, one of the late night Air New Zealand flights was just lining up and departing as we approached.
Mum and Dad were still buzzing about it this morning... Dad said to me 'Auckland by Day is pretty spectacular... but at night? Wow! It's something else...'
Awesome! ;)
This flight: 0.7 PinC Night
Total Hours: 170.5 (78.9/69.9 Day, 8.6/13.1 Night, 7.0 IFR)
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