Beaver ZK-BFN

Over the last few days I have posted the histories of the first two Fieldair Beavers ZK-AZB and ZK-BBX.  In those posts I referenced the earlier posts on the blog by Dave Paull who had been requested to do some posts on Beavers in the run up to the Lawson Field reunion at Gisborne over Labour Weekend in 2010.

Dave did not do posts on all of our Beavers at that time so I thought I would fill in the blanks and update his original posts to bring them up to date.  I will start with Fieldair's Beavers of which there were 19 in total.  I have a soft spot for Beavers as I was attending Rongotai College in the 1960s when many Beavers were imported, most of them for Fieldair.  And I often saw Beavers from their fleet and other companies arriving at Rongotai for maintenance. 

The third Beaver in the Fieldair fleet was ZK-BFN  which was first registered to De Havilland Aircraft Ltd of Downsview, Ontario as CF-HGW on 12/4/54.  It was quickly exported to New Zealand arriving in May 1954.

ZK-BFN (c/n 564) was registered to the De Havilland Aircraft Company New Zealand Ltd on 20/5/54 and they used it as a demonstrator and it carried out demonstrations of air dropping fencing materials as in the above photo which was taken near Palmerston North.  The photo is probably a DHNZ publicity photo and is via Janic Geelen.

It was registered to Fieldair Ltd on 4/4/55.  It was damaged when it hit HT wires at Rakauroa on 27/1/58 but was repaired . It is photo'd here with the Fieldair logo on the door.  I do not have a record of who took this photo or where it is.

It acquired the standard Fieldair blue and white colour scheme as in this photo which I took of on one of its visits to Hawker Siddeley in Wellington for maintenance in the 1960s.

And this photo of it was taken by New Zealand Beaver expert Graeme Mills at Dannevirke in 1960.  

However it never got any of the later yellow colour schemes as it was written off in a bizarre accident at Gisborne on 14/4/69 when it took off on a test flight after maintenance with its aileron cables reversed and crashed heavily, injuring the 2 pilots.  It was cancelled from the register on 28/4/69.