Giveaways
An immersive museum experience made up for cancellation of the Classic Fighters 2025 airshow.
THIS EASTER, my friend Chris drove to Blenheim, near the northern tip of the South Island, for the Classic Fighters airshow that takes place in odd-numbered years on the outskirts of town.
The place where Classic Fighters happens is called the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre, a surprisingly well-stocked war museum that is a must-visit in its own right.
The museum is divided into two sections, Knights of the Sky (World War I) and Dangerous Skies (World War II).
Thanks in part to a pair of adjacent businesses called Classic Aero Machining Services and Engineering and JEM Aviation, most of the aircraft on display are no ‘mere’ museum pieces but perform in the airshows.
Take this one, a D-Day era Spitfire of the type known as Mk XIV (Mark Fourteen).
The Mk XIV Spitfire had a Rolls Royce Griffon engine, much larger than the better-known Merlin engines that powered most other Spitfires. Whence the power bulges behind the five-bladed propellor (and the nose art too, perhaps).
Here is a video by the museum showing the mighty Griffon engine being run up to blow out the cobwebs in 2019.
Throughout World War II, as in World War 1, the planes were constantly being ‘hotted up’ to overcome the opposition.
In the case of the Mark XIV Spitfire, the main opposition was the German Focke-Wulf 190 or ‘Butcher Bird,’ introduced in August 1941, which shot earlier models of Spitfire out of the sky with ease. The museum has an airworthy specimen, technically an Fw 190 A-8/N, in the 1944-era livery of a Luftwaffe ace named Erich Rudorffer, who called his plane Stahlgewitter.
Here’s the Fw 190’s engine being run up in another official museum video. Restored by a German firm named Flug Werk, this plane took part in the making of a Finnish war movie in 2007, before relocating to Omaka in 2011.
Stahlgewitter means ‘storm of steel,’ doubtless in honour of Ernst Jünger’s memoir of World War One trench warfare, In Stahlgewittern. All Quiet on the Western Front was banned by the Nazis, but Jünger’s less obviously anti-war memoir was not.
It’s just as well that you can see all these historic planes, learn about the stories behind them, and much more, in the museum (which as I say is really not the sort of museum you expect to come across in remote New Zealand!)
For, unfortunately, Classic Fighters 2025 was called off after a fading tropical cyclone, untypical for the South Island, hit town: so much for “New Zealand’s Sunniest Place.”
That left a museum tour as the only option for Omaka. Fortunately, though, the museum was epic, as you can see further from this video, also an official one, of its display of a Lockheed Hudson crashed in one of the jungles of the Pacific.
There are several dioramas or re-created scenes of this sort. They owe a lot to the model-making skills of Wētā Workshops and Sir Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings movies.
All the figures in these dioramas are individually realistic and distinct, just like the first emperor of China’s terracotta soldiers.
Another recreates a famous incident in which a low-flying Britisher chased by the Germans failed to look where he was going and came to an arresting stop in the branches of a tree.
There are several more I haven’t shown, but one that is worthy of particular note in the World War II section shows the Soviet female aviator Lydia Litvyak and a Yak-3 fighter at Stalingrad.
Just like the Mark XIV Spitfire and Fw 190 above, this Yak-3 is airworthy and takes part in the airshows. Indeed, the museum has four airworthy Yak-3’s of different variants, though I think they are all replicas built in the 1990s and 2000s from the original blueprints.
An official museum video shows the same plane and another Yak-3, called Full Noise, taking part in the 2021 Omaka airshow. It was made before the invasion of Ukraine; one would probably not refer so casually to the historical Soviet Union, which included Ukraine and various other countries that eventually broke away, as ‘Russia’ these days.
A very good rundown on the museum and its origins can be found on the New Zealand tourism-experience booking website SeeAndDo, which summarises the museum as “immersive,” as “Stories, not just stuff,” and which also draws attention to Sir Peter’s collection of World War One memorabilia in the Knights of the Sky section:
The memorabilia in this exhibition are mind-blowing, and highlights include the flying suit of America’s highest-scoring ace Eddie Rickenbacker, the dress uniform of France’s top ace Rene Fonck and items belonging to Germany’s the Red Baron, Manfred Von Richthofen. The latter was shot down in France and on display is the Iron cross, cut from the side of his plane on that fateful day in which the top ace of WW1 lost his life.
Plus, all kinds of grimly romantic trophies that either commemorate some ace’s award or, a bit later on, his demise. The Germans seem to have been especially into that sort of thing.
In the following image, the blue-cross medal is the famous Pour le Mérite (‘for merit’) or ‘Blue Max,’ the highest award of the Kingdom of Prussia, the largest state in Germany at the time. The certificate reads “We should also give our lives for our brothers” (1. John 3:16) and then “In memory of Lieutenant Albert Dossenbach. He died for the Fatherland on 3 July 1917.” The certificate concludes with the signature of “Wilhelm, by God’s Grace King of Prussia, etc,” better known to us as Kaiser Wilhelm II. The eagle in the statuette is pierced with an arrow, to indicate that it has fallen. All this must have been a great comfort to Dossenbach’s parents, I suppose.
The Blue Max got its nickname because the first time it was awarded to aviators, it went, simultaneously, to Oswald Boelcke, who largely wrote the rules of air combat for a century to come including the famous line “If possible, keep the sun behind you,” more informally known by his opponents as ‘Beware the Hun in the Sun,’ and Max Immelmann, the inventor of the Immelmann Turn. Presumably, the Blue Max had more of a ring to it than the Blue Oswald.
Here is a silver honour cup awarded to Immelmann by the Kaiser at the same time, or about the same time, that Immelmann got the Blue Max.
There are also World War II memorabilia, including a bust of Marshal Chuikov, the defender of Stalingrad, and the gauntlets he wore while defending the city.
Ironically, and in ways that might be tricky at the moment, and probably were in Cold War days as well, the museum tries to correct a well-known imbalance in Western treatments of World War II, whereby we get the impression that the Western allies won the war singlehanded or, if Hollywood is to be believed, the USA.
In reality, the overwhelming majority of the casualties suffered by both sides in the European Theatre were inflicted on the Eastern or ‘Russian’ Front: the same Russian Front that Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz are continually trying not to get posted to in Hogan’s Heroes.
Russian Front is a misnomer, for, as I have noted above, the Soviet Union of the time contained other countries apart from Russia. Moreover, a large part of the fighting on the so-called Russian Front took place in countries that were on the way to Russia from Germany such as Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states.
For those reasons, and also to prevent the present Russian regime claiming the glory, what we used to call the Russian Front now tends to be called the Eastern Front.
Whatever we call it, the museum has quite a few exhibits focused on that front.
To the right of the Yak-3 diorama, you come to what looks like a ruined building draped with a red flag, inside of which you can sit down to watch a realistic, Imax-like presentation of being in the ruins of Stalingrad with aircraft and tracer bullets flying overhead, and to be shaken up with bangs and rumbles, including the fiery crash of an airplane nearby. This is followed by an accounting of the war dead that puts the Hollywood version in perspective. Signs warn viewers that the Stalingrad Experience is not for the overly sensitive.
The realism of the Stalingrad Experience reminds me of a person I know who came into the picture theatre to watch the 2017 remake of Dunkirk a bit late, and ducked on the way to their seat when the incredibly loud onscreen shooting started.
And, of an elderly relative of the same friend who was invited to watch one of those History Channel documentaries about World War II in colour when they came out a quarter-century or so back, and demurred, saying “it was in colour the first time around, dear.”
If they were still around, I don’t think that person would have been too keen on a trip down memory lane at the Stalingrad Experience, either.
Not everything in the museum is strictly related to the wars. They also have an airworthy 1930s Lockheed Electra 10, one of only two still flying.
This is the same model of aircraft that Amelia Earhart was flying in when she disappeared over the Pacific in 1937. Chris was fortunate to see it flying and grab some footage of it landing.
Even though the official airshow was off, a few such vintage aircraft did take to the skies over Omaka during Easter 2025 as breaks in the weather permitted.
The Lockheed Electra was an all-metal passenger airliner that was, like the equally iconic Douglas DC3 from the same era, ahead of its time in many ways.
A later version called the Electra 12 appears in several scenes of the 1941 film Casablanca, such as this one.
And Neville Chamberlain stepped down from a Lockheed 14 Super Electra to wave his notorious and, as it turned out, worthless scrap of paper containing Herr Hitler’s declaration of peaceful intentions toward the British and everyone else.
(History has been unkind to Chamberlain. But then again, how was the poor old bloke, who grew up in Victorian England, to know that there were chaps who didn’t keep to their word?)
The Super Electra was essentially the same aircraft as the Lockheed Hudson bomber, the one shown crashed in the jungle at Omaka. One was the civilian version, the other the military version.
Omaka’s Electra 10 had passengers in it, peering excitedly out of the windows. You can pay to take joy flights in some of the aircraft at Omaka, including a historic wartime Avro Anson. There was also an airworthy DC3 with an image of Jean Batten on the tail, which the museum calls the Jean Batten Clipper. Presumably, it takes people up from time to time as well.
If you have more money and more of a yen for excitement, you can even go up in one of the four Yak-3’s, the one called ‘Full Noise.’
Finally, there is also a classic cars museum next door, which I may feature in another post later on.
There’s more about this part of the country in one of my books, The Sensational South Island, on sale on my website a-maverick.com.
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