The life and times of ZK-BBJ

[іди на хуй Влад - formerly known as Distraxi]

I posted last week about a bunch of derelict planes being auctioned by the Kenyan Airport Authority on a "you can have them for virtually nothing as long as you take the darn things away!" basis.

What I failed to notice, and an eagle-eyed kiwi journalist has (and has got a story out of), is that one of the DC3s gently decaying at Mombasa airport has a ZK (i.e. New Zealand) registration. It turns out that, as you might expect with a 70-odd year old plane that's wound up where it has, ZK-BBJ has been some places and seen some things:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/news/126955885/the-sad-demise-of-zkbbj-a-piece-of-nz-aviation-history-left-to-rot-at-a-kenyan-airport

Shame its likely fate is to be cut up for scrap, but I imagine having not moved since 1995 there's nothing left on it of value at this point.

Continuing the recent theme of "decrepit wrecks of planes Mrs Distraxi's family have served on", my MIL, who had a brief career as an air hostess for NAC before being swept off her feet by a glamorous young Air Force navigator and settling down to produce little distraxi in-laws, almost certainly crewed on this one: she definitely workd DC3s for a while, and there weren't that many in NAC's fleet.

[Chariotoflove]

@distraxi
What a historic and amazing plane. Too bad the purchase price isn’t the true cost of ownership.