The Air Force Museum of New Zealand is set to house two giant aircraft with help from a $5 million grant from the Christchurch City Council.
The museum’s $16 million extension will house both the NZ7001 Hercules and the NZ4203 Orion.
The Royal New Zealand Air Force aircraft served for six decades and were at the forefront of New Zealand transport and reconnaissance duties, as well as countless humanitarian missions all over the world.
They are currently partly dismantled in storage hangars at the Christchurch museum until a space large enough can be built to put them on permanent display.
Museum director Brett Marshall said, “This is fantastic news for the museum – and we can’t thank the council and all the people who supported us enough for getting in behind us.”
“The council’s backing means we can now launch our campaign in earnest to raise the rest of the money to hit our planned start date of April 2027,” Marshall said.
The museum is run by a not-for-profit trust and occupies the site of the former RNZAF base at Wigram. First opened in 1987, it is a national museum and war memorial as well as a top attraction in Christchurch.
It is enjoying a record year for visitors, with more than 200,000 people visiting for exhibitions and corporate events over the past year.
This included more than 18,000 people who flocked to see the Lockheed C-130H Hercules at five open days in April.
Marshall said that the RNZAF Hercules completed its final landing after 60 years in service on a shortened grass runway outside the museum in February, and the level of interest in the aircraft since then had taken everyone by surprise.
“The Hercules is a national hero that everyone seems to have taken to heart. It performed extraordinary service for New Zealand all over the world for 60 years, and it still inspires awe and wonder in everyone who sees it,” he said.
“We can’t wait to build it, and our Orion, a new forever home so that they can be viewed and their stories told for the generations to come,” Marshall said.
NZ4203 is the only Lockheed P-3K2 Orion in the RNZAF’s fleet of six to be conserved / supplied
About NZ4203:
NZ4203 is the only Lockheed P-3K2 Orion in the RNZAF’s fleet of six to be conserved. It was delivered in 1967 and flew 27,000 hours in its 54-year career.
This included missions from submarine hunting, protecting our territorial waters and carrying out hundreds of search and rescue missions.
It was the first Orion to land in Antarctica in 2006.
About NZ7001:
NZ7001 was the first of the RNZAF’s five Lockheed Hercules to be built and it will be preserved as an example of the extraordinary fleet of aircraft that clocked up more than 155,000 accident-free flying hours and nearly 100,000 landings since 1965.
The aircraft pulled off the last of more than 20,000 landings on a shortened airstrip when it landed on a shortened runway at Wigram in February this year – 30 years after Wigram closed as an operational base.
