During Easter weekend 2008 I attended the Warbirds Over Wanaka airshow at Wanaka, New Zealand. It’s the biggest airshow in the southern hemisphere and one of the best in the world, both for its beautiful setting and for the outstanding variety of participating aircraft.

Wanaka is on New Zealand’s south island, in a landscape dominated by large lakes and the towering Southern Alps. The airshow venue at Wanaka Airport is in a natural amphitheater that provides an intimate setting where spectators can get an eyeful of low-flying aircraft ranging from replica WWI and restored WWII fighters to postwar jets and an array of aerobatic and military airplanes and helicopters.

The three days of the airshow (a practice day on Friday followed by two highly choreographed displays on Saturday and Sunday) provided ample opportunities to watch, hear, and photograph many seldom-seen aircraft types. High-performance piston- and jet-powered planes roared by, requiring a quick eye and a quicker shutter, but the WWI fighters hung in the air as if they were posing for the crowd. A Sopwith Camel powered by an authentic rotary engine popped and smoked its way across the sky, along with a Nieuport 11, a Pfalz D.III, and a pair of Fokker Dr.I triplanes sporting elaborate paint schemes. The whole menagerie swooped, dived, and swirled around each other in a low-speed dogfight.

Pfalz D.III and Sopwith Camel go head-to-head (J. Seal photo)

The Wanaka show was originally conceived 20 years ago by Sir Tim Wallis, a pilot and entrepreneur with a large personal collection of historic fighters. WWII warbirds have always had a starring role at Wanaka, and 2008 was no exception. It’s always great to hear Rolls-Royce Merlin V-12s; at Wanaka a beautifully restored Hawker Hurricane and a pair of Mustangs provided great sights and sounds while showing themselves to the crowd. A pair of Allison V-12–powered P-40 Kittyhawks and a restored, Allison-powered Yak-3 added still more WWII color, sound, and fury. One of the radial-powered stars of this year’s show was a Corsair (in this case a Goodyear-built FG-1D) powered by an 18-cylinder, 2,000-hp Pratt & Whitney engine. The pilot showed the crowd every angle of this big, beautiful gull-winged bird, making it all look graceful and effortless. This war-winning fighter is an outstanding example of how deadly purpose can be aesthetically packaged.

Corsair shows its stuff at Wanaka (J. Seal photo)

Less sophisticated but enormously popular were the Russian Polikarpov monoplane and biplane fighters—stubby little planes with big, loud, 9-cylinder, 1,000-hp radial engines on their noses. They are crowd favorites with all their noise, attitude, and fast-rolling agility, and there are only nine flyable examples in the world, all restored from Russian wrecks by Tim Wallace. They are a real handful to fly and to land, but great fun to watch.

Some liken the Polikarpovs, with their barking exhausts, to “Harleys on steroids.” Others say they look like a 44-gallon drum with wings. But in 1934 the I-16 “Ishak” monoplane was avant-garde with its single cantilever wing and retractable landing gear. By 1938, experience in the Spanish civil war proved the I-16’s obsolescence, but it remained in Russian service until 1943, occasionally successful against faster Messerschmitt Bf 109s in a slow-turning, low-altitude fight. Surprisingly, Polikarpov followed its “modern” monoplane with a biplane variant in 1938: the I-153 “Chaika” has the same big engine and retractable landing gear, an upper gull wing, high speed for a biplane, and even more low-speed lift. Both of these little fighters have poor forward and downward visibility, and neither has flaps or trims, so “hot” landings are the norm. Even an extremely experienced warbird pilot like John Lanham, who put the I-153 through its paces at Wanaka, says they are tricky—and constantly challenging—to fly, but the noisy spectacle of the Polikarpovs diving and rolling wowed the crowd.

Plenty of attitude: Polikarpov I-16 “Ishak” and I-153 “Chaika” (J. Seal photos)

A C-47 Dakota (DC-3), a big PBY Catalina flying boat, and a gaggle of WWII-era AT-6 trainers (called Harvards in Commonwealth service) added to the period flavor. The PBY made a simulated bombing run on a (plywood) “German submarine” said to have sneaked up the river to Wanaka, accompanied by impressive pyrotechnics. The “Roaring Forties” aerobatic team flew the Harvards, and their performance showed why these muscular trainers were a WWII pilot’s last step before graduating to fighters.

PBY Catalina attacks a plywood U-boat with “deadly effect” (J. Seal photos)

Another rare sight was a pair of DeHavilland Vampire jet fighters (in this case two-seat trainer variants). The Vampire became operational in 1946, and later models remained in service into the 1970s. The performance of these small, agile twin-boom fighters made it easy to see why the great piston-and-propeller fighters of WWII rapidly gave way to early jets.

DeHavilland Vampires over Wanaka (J. Seal photo)

Aerobatic displays are always a significant part of the Wanaka airshow. The Polikarpovs and Harvards showed how it was done in the 1930s and ‘40s, and Yak 52s and Nanchang CJ-6s, with their lighter weight and greater agility, took us closer to the current era. Two ultramodern aerobatics planes showed the current state of the art: Doug Brooker of Auckland flew his carbon fiber two-seat MX2, putting on a colorful show directly over the stands, and Lithuanian aerobatic champion Jurgis Kairys showed off the Juka, a plane he designed and built himself after a stint designing aerobatic aircraft for Sukhoi in Russia. This impressive little plane is powered by a 400-hp radial engine, giving it an excellent power-to-weight ratio. Kairys climbed vertically straight off the runway, zoomed up to altitude, hung on the prop, dived, looped, rolled crazily, and performed stunts of his own invention before the disbelieving crowd. For an encore he put the Polikarpov I-16 through its not-as-violent but far noisier paces, rolling and looping the tubby little monoplane and beating up the crowd with its basso-profundo exhaust.

“Roaring Forties” Harvards put on a show (J. Seal photo)

The Australian Air Force showed off some modern military muscle at Wanaka. A low-flying C-17 jet cargo plane filled the sky overhead as the crew performed low-altitude maneuvers normally reserved for smaller, nimbler aircraft. The loudest airplane in the show, an Australian Air Force F-111 swing-wing bomber, roared over the field showing its various wing sweep angles, blasting a plume of flame behind it and setting off half the alarms in the car park.

Low-flying Australian Air Force F-111 burns some fuel—and shakes the ground (J. Seal photo)

These were just some of the highlights from a weekend packed with displays to delight aviation buffs. With its concentration of exotic and familiar aircraft, great flying, and a setting that made it easy to appreciate the varied sights and sounds of historic and modern aviation, Wanaka was an ideal airshow experience.