Having started on my series of Pterodactyl microlights of New Zealand, I have found out quite a lot more about them. This has been helped hugely by Murray Hagen who was the Pterodactyl agent in New Zealand from the beginning - thanks Murray. Then I got a big boost over the weekend when Jim Barnett who was an early Pterodactyl owner in Southland and then bought an Ascender II+2 and flew out of Pikes Point airfield as a microlight instructor in the 1980s, allowed me to copy photos from his photo collection. (There must be other early microlighters out there who have collections of old microlight photos - if you are one of them and have early photos, please get in contact with the Editor).
Here is one of the photos from Jim Barnett's collection. You cannot see the registration which is a problem with lots of the early microlight photos, but with Murray Hagen's knowledge it can be identified as the Perodactyl Ptraveller ZK-EWS. I had not known of any Ptravellers in New Zealand but now I understand that they were an early version of the Ascender that was lighter in construction and could be easily dismantled for road transport, and that had a direct drive propellor for its Cuyuna engine, and this can be seen in the photo.
I have previously posted about a couple others of these microlights when I had erroneously called them Pfedgelings (the Pfledgeling did not have a canard). These other two were ZK-FVN and ZK-PJH. I will go back and alter my original post to reflect this and also add the photo of ZK-EWS.
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