One of the first guests on the Allplane podcast when it was starting up, back in 2020, was Duane Emeny, COO of a very special airline: Air Chathams.

-> You can listen to it here!

As if being the home airline of the Chatham Islands, a wind-swept remote archipelago located between New Zealand’s main islands and Antarctica, was not remarkable enough, Air Chathams was the only regular operator of the Convair-580 airliner left in the world.

The Convair 580 was a design from the late 1940s, included in this list I compiled for CNN of vintage airliners you can could still fly.

Air Chathams’ Convair was used to transport both passengers and cargo, mainly fish (I wonder if there was some lingering fish smell in the cabin!), so, yes, it was used as an airliner on regular routes.

But this is over now, since Air Chathams remaining Convairs have finally been decommissioned and sent to the NZ National Toy and Transport Museum in Wanaka, in New Zealand’s south island.

So, a bit overdue, because the final Convair flight took place earlier this year, but I have just happen to have across this video and thought it was a good idea to share it here as an homage of sorts!

Btw, now that we are at it, a few lines to remember Convair, an American aircraft maker (owned by General Dynamics sine 1953) that, back in the early 1960s, challenged Boeing and Douglas in the nascent civilian jet market.

Convair proposed the Convair 990 Coronado as an alternative to the then revolutionary B707 and DC-8 aircraft. It was smaller, but faster than its rivals, but it was a commercial flop. Only 37 Coronados were ever built.

If it lost this contest, it was not due to lack of technical excellence, though!

The last flight of the Convair