Kaitaia Aero Club    

           Quality Aviation Since 1948     

Phil & Wife Esther in 2004 celebrating their 60^th Wedding Anniversary

With a flight in a Tecnam Golf

Here is his story.

Phil Lightband’s soul has never left the sky since 1933 when, at the age of seven, he took his first flight—as a passenger with Charles Kingsford Smith in the Southern Cross, when his father paid for them both to take a ten-minute joyride with the famous aviator.

A year later, soon after his father obtained his pilot’s licence, Phil began flying with his dad whenever he could, and soon became a virtual fixture of the New Plymouth Aero Club where he swept hangars, cleaned aeroplanes and unobtrusively did everything he possibly could to involve himself in aviation.

Gradually, Phil’s father (who was not an instructor) began teaching the young boy to fly. At the age of 14, Phil made his first solo flight at New Plymouth—an event witnessed and celebrated by a supportive crowd of club members with whom the helpful and hard-working young Lightband had become very popular. It was 17 December 1939 and the world had been at war for three months.

Eight months later, when he was just 15, Phil made his first “official” solo flight under the watchful eyes of Allan Pritchard, the chief pilot of the Public Works Department. Pritchard, who knew the

 Lightbands, became the first of several officials prepared to feign ignorance of Phil’s real age in order to sign his logbook and necessary paperwork.

Four months later—while still only 15 years old—Phil was issued a private pilot’s licence by Air Force instructor Allan Crighton that recorded his age as 17.

It was not only the aviation authorities who were duped by this minor (but deliberate) “administrative oversight” but also the young lady who would become Phil’s wife. As a spotty young 15-year-old, Phil produced his pilot’s licence as “proof” of his advanced years to convince the beautiful Esther Hart that he was not some immature schoolboy.

The separations and hardships that Phil and Esther endured near the end of the war, and the pair’s subsequent lifelong relationship, are also captured brilliantly in the deliberately “different” style used by Wendy Laurenson throughout her book EARLYBIRD. Using prose that is more poetry at times, she reaches deep inside readers’ hearts—and squeezes. I suspect few who read this book will be able to avoid shedding a quiet emotive tear or two.

As soon as he was 18, Phil joined the RNZAF. During his training, he experienced the first of what would be many “close calls” in his flying career when another aircraft collided with his stationary Harvard and came within inches of taking his life. In a later crash, which Phil witnessed, one of his close friends lost his life in a spinning P40. Throughout Laurenson’s book, she describes Phil’s reflections on the “fate” that spared  him while inexplicably taking others—the same theme captured to perfection in Ernest K. Gann’s classic aviation book, Fate is the Hunter.

Understandably, in light of his years of (secret) flying experience, Phil qualified as a fighter pilot and after training first in P40s, moved on to fly Corsairs in the Pacific at the end of 1944.

With the end of the war in the Pacific in August 1945, as Phil’ stint of combat came to an end, he experienced another fateful escape when a missing signature on his clearance papers prevented him from catching his scheduled flight home in a DC3. The DC3 he was supposed to take disappeared en route and was never seen again.

The end of the war was a mixed blessing to Phil. Although thrilled to be home with his beloved Esther, he struggled to return to a “normal” life working in the family’s pram factory. Having flown the mighty Corsair in combat, it was difficult for him to accept a tame return to civil flying in Tiger Moths and Taylor Cubs.

Phil enjoyed performing aerobatics and, back at the New Plymouth Aero Club, became part of a formation Tiger Moth aerobatic team. Not surprisingly, he also decided to obtain a commercial pilot’s licence. This was when the pre-war “administrative oversight” of his actual birth date came back to haunt him…briefly. Thankfully, comprehensive answers to some of the long and serious questions about Phil’s real age would have involved references to individuals who, by then, held senior and influential positions within the country’s civil aviation bureaucracy, so his birth date was quietly rectified on official papers and the matter quietly put to bed for good.

Phil’s youthful exuberance soon led to the New Plymouth Aero Club imposing a year-long “grounding” following an inverted, low-level fly past in a Tiger Moth. The grounding was devastating to Phil, who couldn’t even begin to contemplate a whole year on the ground.

The aero club’s “grounding” only applied in New Zealand aero clubs, of course, and didn’t affect the validity of Phil’s licence. Desperate to fly, he decided to take up an offer by another young Kiwi pilot, Peter Hobart, to join him in a scheme to travel to England to buy a war surplus light aircraft, with the intention of flying it back to New Zealand to sell. Aircraft, which were being sold for next to nothing in the UK were scarce—and thus valuable—in New Zealand.

Many people thought it was a ridiculous scheme—and of course it was. However, in his desperation to return to the air, it was the best Phil could conceive, and he and Peter Hobart set about making it happen.

The pair arrived in England (by sea, of course) and set about looking for a suitable aircraft, eventually settling on a Percival Proctor III. The Proctor was hardly an ideal aircraft for such a mammoth flight, with a ridiculously inadequate endurance of three and a half hours. This meant that at its cruise speed of just over 120 knots, it only had a range of around 400 nautical miles. What was more, the aircraft had no radio communication or navigational instruments, and all navigation was by map reading and dead reckoning.

Undeterred by the aircraft’s inadequacies, the pair teamed up with a third man who would accompany them as a passenger, and set off on the adventure of a lifetime. The aircraft’s weaknesses and the trio’s shoestring budget meant that their adventures along the way were many and varied. Disregarding, for a moment, the natural dangers of the weather, the route they were forced to take was a minefield of geographical and political hazards. World War 2 had been “officially” over for four years, but many of the countries they flew through or landed in were still racked by conflict.

By the end of their long, arduous, dangerous journey, the resilient trio had become famous around the world. The gallant little Proctor eventually made it to Sydney, where it was disassembled to make the last part of its journey to New Zealand by sea. Not surprisingly, the venture did not make money and barely broke even. Nevertheless, its value in building the characters of its participants was inestimable and Phil Lightband was a different man from the one who had left New Zealand five months earlier.

Stronger in character, wiser and a significantly more experienced pilot, he soon became involved in New Zealand’s fledgling agricultural aviation industry, working for Miles King and his new company, Rural Aviation. In these pioneering days, the first aircraft widely used for topdressing were Tiger Moths. Phil survived his time flying the overloaded flimsy Tiger Moths in this dangerous role, although some good friends of his did not.

The dangers that these early pilots faced and the sacrifices that they made contributed greatly to improving New Zealand’s farming economy—a contribution that their successors continue to this day.

Before too long, Rural Aviation’s Tiger Moths gave way to newer and bigger types like the Beaver and then early Cessnas (initially Cessna 170s then Cessna 180s and 185s, and Cessna Ag Wagons). Rural Aviation became a Cessna dealer, and successfully sold a great many Cessna aircraft in Australia and New Zealand. As the company expanded, Phil no longer flew topdressing but, as the operations manager and chief pilot, became increasingly involved in managerial and flight-testing duties, and became very successful as a new-Cessna salesman. Having been a successful pioneer in the agricultural aviation business, Miles King wanted to pioneer another aspect of aviation in New Zealand—private IFR flight. It seems hard to believe today, when anyone with a current instrument rating can fly IFR, but it was not too long ago that instrument flight and the airways were strictly reserved for commercial airlines and their large aircraft, and there was no such thing as “single-pilot” IFR.

While aero clubs trained pilots how to fly using instruments, there was no practical application for them to fly using their instruments anywhere outside the airline environment. Phil Lightband and Miles King decided to challenge the status quo, and quietly trained themselves in IFR flight, with each pilot acting as safety pilot for the other.

In 1957, Miles King imported a Cessna 310 light twin—fully IFR—for his Australian company, Rex Aviation, which had pre-sold it to an American mining company in Australia. Miles and Phil flew the 310 across the Tasman via Norfolk Island in a deliberate effort to “normalise” flying and make people realise that general aviation was nothing “special” or amazing, but was ordinary and straightforward.

After arriving in Australia, they also took the aircraft as far as New Guinea before returning to Sydney. There, they undertook training with the Qantas instrument flying school before being tested by an Australian Civil Aviation testing officer for their instrument ratings—which they both passed. However, even in Australia, it was still not legal to fly “single-pilot” and it was not until they later went to the US that both men flew single-pilot IFR in another two 310s the company had bought with the intention of ferrying them (in 1957, a still unprecedented feat) from the US to New Zealand.

The convoluted happenings of Rural Aviation, Rex Aviation and the burgeoning agricultural industry are all mentioned in Laurenson’s book as it describes numerous other adventures for Phil between 1957 and 1966, by which time there was still no such thing as single-pilot IFR in New Zealand.

By 1966, Phil Lightband and Miles King—and all of New Zealand aviation—were ready for single pilot IFR, and Phil approached the Civil Aviation Department to request a flight test. His IFR “flight test” involved a marathon three-day ordeal throughout all of New Zealand by the Civil Aviation Department’s chief airline testing officer in a Rural Aviation Cessna 182. The test was clearly intended to “prove” that such a ridiculous notion as single-pilot IFR was impossible, but Phil could not be fazed and the testing officer’s best efforts were unable to rattle him. In 1966, Phil Lightband became New Zealand’s first pilot to achieve a single-pilot IFR rating.

A year later, Phil was involved in an attempt to begin a commercial air service in the North Island using a Cessna 402. Unfortunately, the state monopoly that existed in virtually all things aviation made it extremely difficult and, despite finally gaining approval to operate, the conditions imposed by the state-run domestic airline, NAC, eventually made it impossible. After less than a year, Sky Travel—as the new airline had been called—went out of business.

Meanwhile, the topdressing industry and the aircraft sales business had—until then—continued to thrive, and Phil and Esther moved to Auckland in order for Phil to head things for Rex Aviation New Zealand. Unfortunately, agricultural aviation was about to enter a significant downturn as income from primary produce plummeted throughout the country and farmers began cutting back on expenditure. When this coincided with a severe drought in Australia, which strangled aircraft sales in that country, it spelt the end for Rex Aviation as Phil had known it.

In 1968, an Australian company, which already had a major interest in Rex Aviation Australia, bought into Rex Aviation New Zealand, which was by then a public company. With an effective major control of Rex New Zealand, the new owner made changes that Phil was not prepared to accept and he left the company.

This pretty much marked the end of Phil’s commercial flying days in New Zealand, and he and Esther moved to Samoa to establish a small air service operation there. Despite Phil’s many years of flying, his huge and varied experience, and multiple qualifications, the American authorities in Samoa insisted that he had to re-qualify completely for his American licences. Phil had to start from scratch, sitting ground and flight tests—all the way from student to commercial pilot as well as his instrument rating.

Although the tiny air service in Samoa didn’t last too long, Phil eventually secured a valuable ground-handling contract with America’s Military Airlift Command to ground handle its aircraft passing through Pago Pago, while Esther landed a job as the public relations officer at a major hotel there.

In 1971, Phil gave up flying for a living and the couple moved to Fiji where they managed a hotel and then ran a chicken farm. In 1978, they finally returned to New Zealand where they ran a successful tourist hotel and restaurant, before finally “retiring” in 1991.

Despite ostensibly ending his days in the air in 1971, Phil’s soul never left the sky for a moment and although he still flew occasionally for pleasure when he visited friends in Hawaii, it was heartbreaking for someone like Phil not to be active in the air. However, at 83 years old he is still fit and healthy, and now, thanks to the advent of new microlight aircraft, he is once again able to take to the sky. He and Esther recently celebrated their 60^th anniversary with a flight in a Tecnam.

There are very few old soldiers or airmen like Phil Lightband left—men who were prepared to sacrifice everything for the rest of us. There are even fewer whose efforts for their country extended so tangibly into civilian life after the war. Thank you, Phil Lightband—you and all your wartime comrades in arms, and your peacetime colleagues in the industry. Without your efforts, our aviation world would be a different place today.

Anyone interested in obtaining a copy of Wendy Laurenson’s delightful book, Earlybird—The Story of Phil Lightband, can contact Phil directly at earlybird@xtra.co.nz, or write to him at Box 132, Mill Bay, Mangonui, 0442, or phone him on 09 406 1030. Copies are still available for $20 plus p&p. This book has broad appeal well beyond the aviation community.