After the first official airmail on 17 February, there were three further official New Zealand - Australia airmails and one official Australia-New Zealand airmail in 1934. The second official trans-Tasman airmail was on 29 March 1934 by Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.
The flight was from Ninety Mile Beach, Kaitaia in the northern tip of the North Island and took 13 hours 25 minutes to reach Sydney. 21,861 letters were carried and a special handstamp was used. The co-pilot was J.T. Pethybridge, the navigator was P.G. Taylor and the radio-operator was J. Stannage.
The plane was the Fokker VIIb/3m monoplane Southern Cross used in the original trans-Tasman flight of 1928. It was commemorated in a set of historic aircraft issued in May 2001.
Most covers were backstamped in Sydney although some, including this one, were missed.
A special cover was produced listing the six trans-Tasman flights that had been made in the Southern Cross although this was the first carrying an official airmail.
Some of the official covers, including the above, have two errors
in the list of flights.
They are shown on the right.
In this cover, the printed 1935
has been corrected by hand to 1934.
The next cover has the postage made up with the other two values from the airmail set. The first cover was first postmarked in Christchurch and the special datestamp was applied later. In this case, only the special datestamp was applied.
It does have the Sydney backstamp which is at 4pm on the 29 March.
Due to the number of covers that had to be dealt with in a very short time, several different datestamps were used. Walker lists 6 varieties, three of which are shown below.
The differences in the datestamps include:
- shape of the 3 in MR34,
- position of dot in N.Z. which is i) left of C, ii) right of C, iii) above C
- position of AITAIA
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All scans were made by the author.
Information on this page is taken from:
Airmails of New Zealand, volume 2 (1986) compiled by
Douglas A Walker, and
The New Zealand Airmail Catalogue, (2nd Edition, 1994)
by James Stapleton.
Both are published by the
Air Mail Society of New Zealand