Wollongong Aviation Museum

The main event of my weekend away was to check out the HARS aviation museum. The museum is located at Shellharbour Airport, where I flew in on Link the night before. I’ve wanted to come here for a while now, but life got in the way. The HARS museum is run by volunteers who basically restore old aircraft back to flying condition (or as close to as possible). Their most known acquisition would be the Lockheed Super Constellation - aka “Connie”. The next “big” attraction to the museum arrived in 2015 when “City of Canberra” 747 registered VH-OJA made the 15-minute hop down from Sydney to be delivered to HARS on retirement from Qantas. This aircraft was to be the main attraction for my visit.

The 747 was the first aircraft I ever flew on. That was a 747-300 series on a short hop from Melbourne to Sydney back in 1996! Thus, it’s always had a special place in my heart as possibly the aircraft that got me addicted to aviation. The 747 at HARS is a 400 series, and a record breaker. It flew non-stop from London Heathrow to Sydney when it arrived in the Qantas fleet back in 1989. Today, it no longer flies, finding a forever home at HARS. It’s also the feature of the premium tour I signed up for today. The tour just has 4 guests on it, with the group later split into 2 smaller groups of 2 for an even more personalised experience. Such amazing value for only $205!

I arrived about half an hour early to find the other 3 people on the tour group also already waiting. We’re all keen beans today. The volunteers bring us in to start the tour early. We are dressed in purple vests that read “HARS VIP TOUR” in big, bold yellow letters across our vests. The vests live up to the VIP experience all day long! I won’t go through everything we did because the 2.5-hour tour ended up going for almost 7 magical hours.

The group of tour guides outnumbered the number of participants (which they deliberately do to ensure a great experience). I’m hopeless with names, but we had a former 747 Captain, 2 former flight attendants (who met onboard and married), an engineer, and a coordinator. Our engineer turns 80 this year (or maybe was already), and he was still climbing in and around the engineering bay and cargo holds with us. The people really make the tour - they share their experiences of life working on or around the 747. It’s amazing.

To give a rough breakdown of how the day went, we started off with an introduction to all the volunteers who would look after us on the upper deck of the 747. Sitting in the exit row brought back memories of previous work trips, one notably coming back from Bangkok where I spent a little bit of time in the bathroom on this deck returning the bottle of Bollinger I had on the ground after a long delay in the Bangkok First Lounge. Ah, memories!

Next, we did a walk around of the 747. A necessity for any pre-flight check. This was done with the engineer who explained what most of the bits and bobs were on the aircraft. He also explained some issues he encountered in his career, how we went to Seattle to train on the 747, and the life of working with Qantas throughout the years. Such an interesting story. He described using the aircraft pressurisation system to blast out a blocked toilet pipe, saying that was a much cleaner way to fix the problem.

The group of 4 then split in two. I was paired with an ex-British guy from Sydney, while the mother-daughter combo headed up to the flight deck. We met the cabin crew who took us through the main deck of the 747. We went from nose to tail and back on the upper deck, with them describing all the classes, galleys, and crew positions on the aircraft. The only part I hadn’t seen before (as a passenger) was the cabin crew rest area. I got to climb up above the cabin and check out the bunks. So cool for this avgeek. After seeing the passenger deck, the engineer took us into the engineering bay, filled with all the computers that power the 747, and then the cargo deck.

With the passenger, engineering, and cargo decks all covered, it was our turn to sit in the cockpit. A life goal to sit in the left-hand seat of a 747 was achieved. Unlike other museums, this cockpit was also powered up! Everything was on! We spent probably close to 1.5 hours in the cockpit, maybe longer. The captain took us through all the preflight checks and what the controls all do (well, as much as you can do with a couple of rookies). We pretended to be flying from Sydney to Melbourne, entered the route into the flight computer, entered take-off weights and v1, v2, and vr speeds. Oh, such nerdy goodness. I had such fun. A dorky highlight for me was being about to turn off and on the seatbelt light and making the cabin have that “ding” sound.

We had to take a quick break for lunch at 1:50 before the café closed. We returned to the cockpit afterwards and probably could have spent the whole day chatting there, but alas, the museum closed at 3pm and we still had to tour the rest of the hangars. No worries, one of the volunteers stayed behind and took us for an after-hours tour of the hangars and planes. We got to board several historic planes, including Connie. Some 7 hours later, with only a 10-minute meal break, we finished up the tour of the hangars.

I’ll wrap up this long post by saying - that was the best aviation tour I’ve ever done. I loved every minute of it and have no idea how the time flew by. I’ll definitely come back and do this tour again sometime. I’d also recommend it for any avgeek. Just do it!Baca lagi