The Big Four Oh

Respected author Dr Stephen Clarke is a history graduate of the University of Otago and the University of New South Wales as well as being a professional historian. His previous works have covered the Returned Services Association and Rotary Clubs in New Zealand, and he is the founder of Making History Ltd, which has been making history accessible, interesting and impactful since 2015. For the past two years Stephen has been carrying out hours of research and interviews with the founders of the family-owned airline, staff and Chatham Islanders, and his upcoming journey through the first 40 years of Air Chathams charts its rise from one man band to the current company that employs more than 150 people and carries over a hundred thousand passengers a year. So how did it all start?

“It really came about because Craig Emeny had a real love of flying,” Stephen says. “His father was a distinguished WW2 fighter pilot who took part in the Battle of Britain and then later in Burma, so that love of planes was in his blood. It was no surprise Craig went into the air force, but he then trained as a commercial pilot and was looking for his ‘next flying gig’.”

This part of the story begins, like all good Kiwi stories, in a pub. Conversations over a beer at the Hotel Chatham in 1981 between some visiting Mid Canterbury farmers who owned a plane and Reg Wills, the owner of the Chatham Island Packing Company, who identified the need to get live crayfish from Pitt Island to Chatham. Reg, being a larger than life character, decided flying them was the modern thing to do and an advertisement was duly placed in an aviation magazine.”

This was just the gig Craig was looking for (although 40 years on, his father’s sage advice to not stay more than three months on the Chathams seems to have been wasted!) and in no time at all he was flying a rented ‘really, really, really old aeroplane’ - Cessna loaded with extra fuel on a recce mission.

“From the moment he lands on Chatham Island, after a 880km flight from Canterbury, Reg, ‘a million miles an hour sort of bloke’, is plotting and planning, even telling Craig ‘we’ll get you married on the Island’! They ended up using the Waitangi Racecourse as the first landing strip and the very next day Craig made the first flight to Pitt Island where he met prominent local family Boe and Ted Lanauze and whose daughter he did indeed marry!”

By 1984 Craig had bought his own aircraft and was flying live crayfish into Gisborne for the lucrative overseas Asian markets. “Very quickly – just two years after landing on the Chats - Craig is becoming a part of the community and has been welcomed into it.

It’s a mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationship; Air Chathams needed the Islanders, and the Islanders needed Air Chathams. This first island-based airline completely changed the crayfish industry and, indeed, the Chathams.”

By the 1990s, and now married to Air Chathams co-owner Marion Emeny, Air Chathams is expanding, but there was a much wider social impact in addition to the economic one; medical supplies, search and rescue, and the odd mercy dash were all in a day’s work for the fledgling airline.

“In 1996 local man Vaughan Hill had to be lifted off Pitt Island following a shark attack. Air Chathams’ long-time pilot Darron Kyle had to be talked in through low mist to make the landing and return Vaughan to Chatham Island, and then the Air Chathams Metroliner flew him up to Wellington - with blood transfusions being carried out enroute! Without that flight he would have died.”

As if life or death situations weren’t enough, the airline was also involved in heated competition described as ‘Air wars over the Chathams’ with a much larger player, Mount Cook Airline (owned by Air New Zealand), who were willing and able to run at a loss to secure a market share. Craig had taken on some of the Chathams stubborn determination by this stage however, and quitting just wasn’t an option.

“Craig had a great loyalty to the Islands, to the cray fishermen and to the community as a whole, and in return the Island was behind him, so he hung in there and by the late 1990s the airline was the sole provider to the Chathams, and now playing a significant role in the establishment of the Islands tourism industry with its much loved Convair aircraft. I think to this day it’s fair to say Air Chathams is probably the only airline to have taken on the national carrier and survived.

What comes out strongly from this formative period is that Craig is not someone to burn bridges; he makes sure, no matter what, that relationships survive. It’s never personal and he’s always thinking about the bigger pictureof what’s best for the Islands’ airline and always the Chathams.”

Stephen’s history of 40 years of Air Chathams will be out later this year - we’ll let you know how and when you can get your copy!