Sunday, 25 October 2009

Avian at Hamilton

Lurking behind the hangars at Hamilton Airport yesterday was the unique Cooke Avian Adventurer ZK-CKE/2. So far unfinished, this aircraft was registered to Bruce Cooke of Cambridge 19Nov2008. Powerplant is to be a Subaru EJ20 Single cam, with an Autoflight reduction gearbox driving an Ivoprop electric Variable pitch prop.





Work has proceeded mightily since I saw the project in Bruce's workshop early in 2008.



The first ZK-CKE was of course the second PL-11 Airtruck, built by Waitomo Aviation at Te Kuiti and first flown 9Mar1965. Seen here at Ardmore in January 1966, it crashed in 1967. There will be an article on the PL-11s in an upcomong Aviation News magazine.

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2 comments:

  1. greybeard25 October 2009 at 23:12

    With respect to ZK-CKE/2, I understand that there is a problem with the powerplant which take some time to resolve. Hence the machine has been moved out of the way to its present position.

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  2. ZK-CKE26 October 2009 at 18:06

    Yup, Thats pretty much the story... Unfortunatley the whole saga is pretty depressing, as I have been relying on lots of people who have let me down a bit. hopefully something wil get sorted out soon, but I've heard that before in the last 11 months!

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