Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre

Housed next to a small airfield in Omaka, near Blenheim, you'll find an extraordinary aircraft museum. In it you'll find some of the best preserved aircraft from WWI and WWII, many displayed in stunningly realistic tableaux relating the unbelievable stories of survival and lost against all odds. The museum is divided into two parts: WWI and WWII. Both have a huge range of memorabilia alongside the planes. Some aircraft are as they were found decades ago while others had been sitting in scrapyards, warehouses or the jungle for decades before being lovingly restored to their original status.

This display depicts that moment when airmen no longer just observed events on the ground but took to the skies with basic infantry weapons with which to attack enemies. It was all very primitive, as you see here. The navigator begins to take on the role of 'gunner' even if that just means taking pot shots at their adversaries with a rifle.

One answer to the problem of using a forward firing machine gun in an early biplane was to have the engine, and therefore the propeller, mounted behind the pilot. Although this allowed free range with the Lewis gun, it was also an additional burden for the pilot to master - on top of flying and keeping the enemy at bay.

Film director Peter Jackson, a huge fan and collector of WWI planes and memorabilia, not only lent the museum several of his aircraft but his company, Weta Workshop was responsible for building the many extremely lifelike scenarios seen in the museum.

Aircraft technicians repairing the spars of a damaged biplane.

Last orders before a mission

In this close up of a two-man crew, you can really get a good idea of how fragile these early planes were - much of the fabric covering wings and fuselage was stitched together, the fabric was 'doped', a type of sealer not too dissimilar to nail varnish, while the control surfaces - rudder, ailerons, etc - were connected by thin cables, many of which are located on the outer surfaces of the aircraft.

Chitchat with the ground crew

In a time before parachutes were standard issue, this was a very interesting story. A very young pilot whose plane had taken a serious hit that crippled its control surfaces. Somehow he worked out out that by stepping out onto the wing, the plane could be flown in more or less a straight line. He managed to guide his aircraft from enemy territory back over no man's land while losing altitude and just as the plane was about to hit the ground - he jumped off, rolled several times before getting back up, brushing the dirt of his flying suit and returning to base.

Every detail has been attended to in the military tableau created for each story by Weta Workshops. Here's a close up of one of the German guards keeping an eye on a downed pilot. He sports an entrenching tool on his belt, along with a Karabiner 98k rifle, steilhandgranate (stick hand grenade) and his bread bag, a canvas pouch carried by every infantrymen to hold their rations - and anything else they could scrounge...

Two airmen chatting after crashing their plane into the top of a tree.

In a rather macabre tableau we see the remains of von Richthofen's plane and corpse being stripped of identifying personal items - such as the fabric crosses on his Fokker Dr.I. triplane - and even his boots. One item of his on display was his silk handkerchief!

A life sized reproduction of the Red Baron's last aircraft, the Fokker Dr.I. triplane

A Curtiss P40 Kittyhawk in its original Pacific Campaign condition

A Russian Yak-3UA piloted by Lydia Litvyak, Russia's first female fighter ace operating in the skies over Stalingrad and later, around Orel. She had more than 12 'kills' to her name before she too became a statistic during the battle of Kursk in 1943.

The de Havilland Mosquito DH98 fighter bomber

Lockheed Hudson light bomber that fought with the New Zealand airforce in the Solomons. It actually came back to New Zealand at the end of the war undamaged, but then spent several decades rotting away in a hanger before being rediscovered and finally donated to the museum to make this iconic display