The growling skies: When warbirds came to town
Sunday, 12 April 2026
Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.
OPINION: Growing up, I went through an assortment of boyhood phases: The “I want to be an All Black” phase; the fast cars phase; the vintage cars phase; the English football phase; the Famous Five phase; the Hardy Boys phase.
Some of those interests still survive, others withered beyond puberty.
There was also another phase - the fighter plane phase.
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The way this manifested itself was, each Christmas, a box would appear in my stocking containing a kitset of some heroic WWII plane that needed to be assembled and brought back to life, on a scale version.
I was largely rubbish at this process.
There were instructions and pictures and tubes of glue and it all should have been exceedingly straightforward, and no doubt was, in the hands of any adequate enthusiast.
I mean, what I eventually constructed looked okay, generally definable as a plane, and similar to the picture on the box, if viewed from a distance.
But where things really went awry was during the painting.
This required the purchasing of very small pots of paint into which I dipped a fine brush, and set to recreate authentic squadron colours or cunning camouflage designs.
My memory is that I did not excel at this.
My memory is of lots of discarded boxes, instruction sheets with spatters of olive and khaki paint across them, and planes that had the patterning of a Friesian cow.
Eventually, my shelves became scattered with these failures: embarrassments to the RAF; assaults on peerless aviation engineering; abuses to the memories of the fearless pilots who flew them.
My bedroom was a morgue of incompetence.
At some stage, my fighter plane phase dried up, like the half-used pots of paint I’d skilllessly smeared over the plastic replicas.
But then, at the weekend, that well-desiccated fascination was brought to life, nourished by the biennial airshow that filled the skies above our village.
Warbirds Over Wānaka is quite a spectacle, a spectacle I hadn’t experienced, or expected to enjoy.
Each day over Easter, small dots in the distance climbed into the skies, loomed larger, their drone becoming a growl becoming a roar, and pierced the sun above as they streaked to the horizon.
Some didn’t streak. The biplanes showed their age and laboured across the sky. Others were far more Clydesdale than thoroughbred.
Some, though, flew so fast they easily outpaced their sound.
The biggest thrill was craning my neck to watch the Spitfires, heroes of WWII’s aerial war, the roar of their Rolls Royce engines instantly speeding you back to the Blitz and Battle of Britain, more than 80 years past.
I was surprisingly entranced by it all.
With each swelling cry of an approaching aircraft, I’d race outside and stare upwards.
Eventually, I found the sturdy macrocarpa table on our deck provided an ideal observation point. That was, until the planes descended on low runs, and our view was blocked by the neighbour’s oak.
So we took a beer to a seat by the river one afternoon; we hiked a hill above the lake in the evening; and we biked to a flat expanse of river terrace one lunchtime, to get a better vantage and view.
And we watched as the planes performed improbable and perilous passes, vapour trails highlighting their spectacular manoeuvres.
They were extraordinary.
They were daredevils.
But for some, they were just devils.
In the run-up to this year’s Warbirds event, protests arose about invitations to military aircraft of a type that had been linked to civilian strikes.
As it turned out, the most vilified aircraft cancelled their visits, due to the war in Iran, and our Air Force pulled out due to soaring fuel prices.
But it didn’t stop a sign being strung on a fence at a busy intersection accusing the absent planes of being otherwise deployed bombing children.
Should anyone be surprised if machinery capable of killing was on display, though? The event’s title is Warbirds, not Doves & Detente.
It would be too easy to characterise this as some kind of Peaceniks vs Petrolheads stoush, a simplification lacking a hemisphere of necessary nuance.
However, there was some irony in 60,000 people watching fighters of yesteryear above Wānaka, at the same time the rest of the world was focused on a downed American F-15E jet and its two missing airmen in Iran’s arid mountains.
In the end, two planes did their best to provide a gesture of compassion and conciliation at the airshow.
As they shrieked vertically, they split and arced apart, before spiralling down to intersect once more, leaving a heart momentarily sketched in smoke in the sky.
Make love, not war.