Airfield Lack ‘Disgrace’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31119, 23 July 1966, Page 1

Airfield Lack ‘Disgrace’

The Government’s procrastination in providing an adequate airfield in the Chatham Islands was a damned disgrace, said the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Kirk) in Christchurch last evening. He had just returned from tne Chatham Islands on a charter flight. The Haupupu airstrip, a three-hour journey from the main settlement, lacked any form of navigational aid or safety equipment. To get to the airstrip passengers had to travel over mud tracks in a utility vehicle to the edge of a lake, where they had to board a trailer drawn by a tractor to travel the remaining seven miles across the lake to the airstrip. Yesterday, in the middle of the lake, the tractor broke

down, said Mr Kirk, and he and other passengers were» stranded for two hours in pouring rain and temperatures of about 40 degrees until another tractor arrived. One of the passengers was a sick man being flown to New Zealand for treatment. “And this is 1966, and happening in a part of New Zealand.” The Sunderland flying-boat service to the islands was to be withdrawn next March. “It is a disgrace that, months before the withdrawal, no steps have been taken to provide an airfield that was proposed as far back as 1955,” Mr Kirk said. “There is no money allocated on the estimates this year, although there is some for engineering work.” There had been five years of warning that the Sunderi lands were to be withdrawn, but there was no prospect of (the islanders having to accept other than the present thoroughly inadequate condi- ; tions. I “The situation, in the ab-

sence of any physical start on construction —not even land acquisition has been started—shows a cynical and callous disregard for the essential transport needs of the island people,” Mr Kirk said. The provision of an airfield remained the greatest immediate need of the island. About 20 urgent medical cases were evacuated from the islands each year, and if a person was sufficiently ill for an emergency flight to be sent from New Zealand then he was far too ill to make the utility vehicle and tractor and trailer journey to the Haupupu field. If the Labour Party became the Government the first thing that would be done would be the provision of navigational aids and emergency equipment at Haupupu. Urgents steps would be taken to provide an alternative airfield, and if the life of the Sunderlands could not be extended, an alternative service would have to be provided.