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Hi Peter, great photos. It's good to see you are both enjoying the Cook Islands.
That poor old Dakota is very forlorn. It looks like someone has tried to convert it into an outrigger canoe. Or perhaps it's roof is now a boat, or a shed?
I have a copy of the fil 'The Silent One', a Kiwi made film very much in the mould of Whale Rider but actually made much earlier. It features Dame Pat Evison (of Flying Doctors fame) 'browned up' as a Cook Islander, but she does a smashing job of it.
As for the Aitutaki strip, I did some research a while back into it when a similar question about the airfield was asked on FlyPast forum.
Here's some of what I found:
In the book "To Fly A Desk - Sir Geoffrey Roberts: Father of Air New Zealand" by Noel Holmes (Reed Publishing, 1982) there is the briefest of a mention. It reads, referring to Geoff Roberts being concerned with setting up airstrips in the Island for the defence in the Pacific in WWII, thus: "He got some grim amusement out of one at Aitutaki, in the Cooks, a more or less circular atoll, where a dog-leg had to be introduced - shades of the North-West Frontier. This strip, of consolidated crushed coral, was put in by the Americans but was never used seriously, although it was later to come in handy as a civilian touchdown point."
Not exactly related but I also discovered that the first aircraft to land on Rarotonga in the Cook Islands group was the RNZAF Lockheed Lodestar NZ3508, captained by Flt Lt Tom Mounsey, on the 25th of Nov 1944. The airport was constructed by the New Zealand Aerodrome Services Branch, and was a gift to the Cooks from NZ Prime Minister Peter Fraser. This was reported (with photo of said first landing) in NZ Wings magazine in August 1986, as part of a wider report about an RNZAF Exercise there from 8th July-5th August 1986 called Operation Joint Venture, with Hercules's, Iroquois's, Andovers, Skyhawks, an Orion and a Boeing 727 plus NZ army troops and Navy Wasp.
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