Homebuilt Helicopters at Parakai

Logan McLean's yearly flyin at Parakai suffered from the bad weather in Auckland on 28 February, but was to go ahead on the altenative rain day, today 1 March. The numbers of aircraft were down over previous years but there were some interesting sport aircraft there nevertheless.

The ones that caught my eye were these 3 different types of homebuilt helicopters. Above is the Rotorway Executive ZK-IOH owned and presumably imported by Lars J Fellman of Helensville, featuring a nice shark scheme. It was previously OH-XOH and was first registered on 26/10/07.

The next is so new it is not even on the NZ Register! It is a Mosquito XE built locally and which is produced by Innovator Technologies of Calgary, Canada. They have a really neat web address - Mosquito Net! (www.mosquito.net.nz).

And from the same company is the Mosquito Air XEL built by Oskar Stielau of North Shore, which is a bare bones version of the Mosquito XE, with the same motor. This has been featured previously on this blog but since then it has a new colour scheme - now it has black fuel tanks with yellow registration, whereas previously it had silver tanks with a red registration!