After a ground up rebuild at North Shore taking more than a year, Inflite Ltd's Pilatus PC-6 Turbo Porter ZK-MCT was having its titling applied when I called into the Inflite maintenance hangar at North Shore yesterday afternoon:
Their Chief Engineer (who follows the blog - nice!) told me that ZK-MCT would be going to Mount Cook for mainly parachute dropping duties, and he also told me that the Inflite Turbo Porters from Motueka and Franz Josef would also be undergoing maintenance and repainting at Timaru.
ZK-MCT was built at the Pilatus factory in Stans, Switzerland as HB-FIO and it was flown to New Zealand for The Mt Cook Group of Christchurch and registered on 4/2/85. It has stayed in the Mt Cook area over several ownership changes - to Tourism Holdings Ltd of Pleasant Point on 1/7/98, to Aoraki Mt Cook Skiplanes Ltd of Mt Cook on 20/12/02, to Inflite Skiplanes ltd of Mt Cook on 27/10/15 and to Inflite Ltd of Auckland on 12/3/20. Along the way it had a couple of whoopsies on the Tasman Glacier on 8/3/88 and 6/5/89 but obviously was repaired.
I have a soft spot for ZK-MCT as it was the aircraft that flew me and my wife up to the Tasman Glacier from Mt Cook airport in September 2019:
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