A NZ Warbirds team led by Woodsy (Graeme Woods) has been restoring the Tiger Moth ZK-ATN over the last four years or so, and it is nearly ready to take to the skies again as can be seen in the photo from the NZ Warbirds Facebook page:
From records I have seen it has a couple of differing early histories but it seems that the fuselage was built by the de Havilland Aircraft Company at Hatfield in the UK and then shipped to New Zealand where the wings were built by DHNZ at Rongotai. The records I am going by show it being taken on charge by the RNZAF on 29 November 1940, serving with 3 EFTS and being stored at Taieri on 8 August 1945. Later it was sold to the Tauranga Aero Club on 8 May 1949 as ZK-ATN and then on 10 October 1949 it was sold to Ron Graham who traded as Airspread Ltd of Tauranga and it was converted to a topdresser. It suffered several incidents and accidents as most of the early topdressers did (forced landing at Komata on 31 December 1949 and undercarriage collapse at Paeroa on 22 February 1951). It was rebuilt and spent some time based at Dannevirke then went to Stratford from June 1954 to May 1957. It was bought by F J McDonald who traded as Airspread (Taranaki) Ltd on 4 July 1957 but he quickly on-sold it on 24 October 1957 to Ted Hollick of Auckland (who was known as the Flying Chimney Sweep). It was badly damaged on 11 December 1959 at Oneriri on Great Barrier Island, when it attempted to take off from Palmers Beach but ran into the sea and overturned. Some components were salvaged but the rest was bulldozed into the sand dunes. It was cancelled from the register on 25 May 1990.
The remains were stored by various Auckland owners before being acquired by NZ Warbirds and they re-registered the Tiger as ZK-ATN on 11 May 2021 with the c/n DHNZ1.
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