An Air New Zealand flight from Auckland to Queenstown was forced to abandon its landing before diverting, as wild weather battered the Otago region.<\/p>\n
Flight NZ637 attempted to land at Queenstown Airport on Friday afternoon but carried out a go-around amid strong winds.<\/p>\n
Jono, a Queenstown local, was walking with his wife to pick up their children from school when the pair noticed the aircraft struggling to approach in windy conditions.<\/p>\n
\u201cTypically, when there\u2019s a bit of wind, you can hear the plane engines sort of throttle up and throttle down as they try and keep things steady.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we kind of looked over and we could just see it rolling from like one wing over to the other, but like quite quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the plane\u2019s movements were unlike anything he had witnessed before.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very exaggerated. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever seen a plane sort of snapping that far over to the left and right before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jono estimated the aircraft continued its unstable approach for 15 to 20 seconds before the pilots abandoned the landing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were wondering why they didn\u2019t really bail out because they were flipping left and right,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Having lived in Queenstown for four years, Jono said it was the worst approach he had seen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s been some real rough weather that they\u2019ve sort of flown in, but that was certainly the worst we\u2019ve seen, or certainly the worst I\u2019ve seen since I\u2019ve been here.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just seemed like they were fighting with how much the plane was rolling that they couldn\u2019t actually start gaining altitude and bail out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the rapid rolling motions had been comparable to the way people mimic turbulence with hand gestures.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought we were actually going to see something far worse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Air New Zealand chief safety and risk officer Nathan McGraw said the flight had experienced turbulence owing to strong crosswinds and windshear.<\/p>\n
Unable to safely land, the Airbus A320 diverted to Christchurch to refuel before returning to Auckland.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe safety and wellbeing of our customers and crew is our utmost priority,\u201d McGraw said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur aircraft are carefully designed to operate safely in turbulence, and our pilots are highly trained to manage these conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Air New Zealand flight from Auckland to Queenstown was forced to abandon its landing before diverting, as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[59861,70,111,43,139,69,20930],"class_list":["post-557918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-airnewzealand","tag-flight","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-queenstown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}