I’ve always had this dream about being involved in an airline. In what role, my dream really didn’t tell me, but I was going to be involved with an airline.

The retail travel agency I had started needed to diversify because we weren’t making much money. We found it hard because all the major players had a whole lot more fat than we did. We tried discounting aggressively, but it was made clear, very, very quickly, that we could never win by starting a price war.

One of the ideas that we had was to do bus tours to Jesus Christ Superstar in Auckland. They were really successful until the bus companies discovered that they could do it cheaper than we could, and that market niche disappeared.

We decided that we would start offering tours of New Zealand to Canadians again, using my brother-in-law in Montreal. That didn’t really work. But on one of the tours that I was escorting, I was in Queenstown when I saw a DC3 flying low over the lake.

"That’s interesting," I thought. The last thing I really wanted was to do charter flights domestically in New Zealand. I wanted to do international charters, but we had so little money, so little cashflow, that I needed a catalyst that would get us through the first stage and raise us some cash that would get us to the next plateau.

I remember calling Patrick from Queenstown and saying I had this good idea. Why didn’t we do a series of charter flights to the Mystery Creek Fieldays in June 1994? He thought it was a good idea and we agreed we should try and get the two Mikes involved.

When I returned to Hamilton, we got together to decide whether we were all keen to do this. My idea was for each of us to put a thousand dollars in the pot and start an air charter company called Kiwi Travel Air Charters. We all agreed. The two Mikes, even at that stage, said they had full-time jobs and they were not interested in being involved on a day-to-day basis.

"You and Patrick can take care of it," they said. The shareholding was split evenly four ways.

Nearly immediately, I was able to source a DC3 and book it for the period of the Fieldays, through Vincent Aviation in Wellington.

We set about thinking how to market the flights. I went to a Hamilton marketing company called Chestermans and the general manager, Mark Ebrey, did a great job in putting a news release together. Because we had so little money, he recommended we use public relations as much as possible to leverage our marketing dollars further, saying a news story would do a better job than advertising, at a fraction of the cost.

One of Mark’s first questions was, "Where will this lead?" He looked at me in the way that only marketing people can look at somebody. I said I really believed this could lead to daily trans-Tasman flying. I got the feeling he was thinking either I’m totally committed, or should be committed.

He said if anybody did call about the press release, stay focused on the DC3. Don’t mention any of the other stuff that we’d planned. We decided, there and then, that we were going to have a Glenn Miller band playing in the background of the cabin, the flight attendants would be dressed in 1940s uniform and everything was going to be first class. We’d fly champagne flights from Wellington to Hamilton, Auckland to Hamilton and, of course, scenic flights at the Fieldays.

One of Mark’ s ideas was to offer to fly a photographer from the local newspaper, the Waikato Times, to Wellington to get a picture of me with a bottle of champagne, canapés and the plane. It worked a treat.

The press release went out and, to my surprise, the media took it up. The next morning this journalist, Andrea Fox, called, bloody early in the morning (I now know the reason why these people call so early in the morning is to catch you off guard. Nothing more, nothing less.) And, of course, one of her questions was, "Where could this lead to?" Before I could control my mouth, it happened.

"Daily flights across the Tasman, the London Gatwick of New Zealand."

At midday, the Waikato Times came out and the front page lead was about Hamilton becoming an international airport, with only a very brief mention of the DC3, which was supposed to have been the whole point of the story.

At this stage we had moved to this tiny, grotty little office in Ward Street. Patrick came in from his lunch break and threw the newspaper at me.

"Look at this! So much for staying focused!"

The phones went ballistic with people inquiring about trans-Tasman charter flights to Brisbane. So now we had two problems. We had to follow through on the DC3 because that was going to be our revenue producer. But, really, my heart and interest was in the possible charters across to Australia. Yes, we were going to have to try do these charter flights, having generated the publicity.

And we would have to find an aeroplane. But that took somewhat of a backburner, because we had to stay focused on the DC3. We set up the DC3 flights and tried direct marketing to the Fieldays exhibitors. We set up manual booking systems – pieces of paper with the flights and the dates and the 32 seats – the tickets were just coupons really. We sat back and waited for the bookings to roll in.

The flights weren’t overly successful and we really struggled, to the point where we only did the inaugural Wellington to Hamilton flight. Three days before the event, Vincent Aviation called up and said the aeroplane wasn’t up and running (which became a common event as we went through Kiwi’s career. I should have known from day one that this was a bad sign.) But, like always, we managed to find a replacement aeroplane – the old DC3 in Queenstown, owned by a company called Pioneer and run by Phil McQuire.

As the Fieldays approached, we ended up selling most of the seats at the last minute, cheaply. Then we were left with the huge job of operating the flights and establishing our credibility. Even during the Fieldays operation we had to cancel flights because of fog, and cope with all the things that came back to haunt us as a full scheduled airline. Not that I could have dreamed then that we were going on to create the monster that we did.

The Fieldays charters were fun. We only got back the money that we had put in but our profile was heightened considerably. The four of us sat down and decided it was time to get serious about the charter flights. We decided to fly from Hamilton to Brisbane, because we felt we could fill the flights going out with New Zealanders wanting to escape the winter. We’d fill the flights back with Australians wanting to ski.

We now had to get not only the authority to operate the flights, we had to find an aeroplane. We had to find money for marketing and set up a sales system that would make this whole thing work.

The licensing was the interesting part. I called the Ministry of Transport and, surprisingly, it was straightforward. The carrier we were going to rent or lease the aeroplane from had to make the application. As long as that carrier already flew out of New Zealand to Australia, they would have all of the relevant CAA licences.

This gave us a number of options including Polynesian Airlines, Air New Zealand, Qantas, Air Pacific, Aerolineas Argentinas and others. We eliminated most of them straight away because we also needed an aircraft that was capable of flying out of Hamilton’s short runway. We faxed all the carriers, but the response was minimal. The initial response was from Polynesian. We negotiated with them and signed a memorandum of understanding.

To fit in with Polynesian’s own schedules, Kiwi Air Travel Charter would have to operate on Tuesdays, and we built our first schedule around that. Being more sales-orientated than anything else, we started selling the seats.

A fax came in from Air Nauru, offering their 737-400 (a beautiful aeroplane) on Sundays, which was a much better day to operate charters on. Should we switch and go with the Air Nauru option? We looked at the booking list and found we had five bookings for the Tuesday flights. We decided the last thing we wanted to do was disrupt those five passengers so we decided to stick with Polynesian. We faxed back to Air Nauru, saying, "No thanks."

As we started to heat up our promotion of the flights, we found we made a fundamental mistake. We had a very limited marketing budget. Apart from the original $4000 from the Fieldays, I borrowed $15,000 from my mother. I decided to use travel agents to promote the flights because they were the best source of information for travellers. Was I wrong.

Within three days of the promotion starting we had only made five bookings. An elderly woman came to my funny little office in Ward Street saying, "I’ve been to three or four travel agents. One says you’re going to run off with my money to South America. Another one said your aeroplane is going to crash and burn at the end of the runway. The third one said your aeroplane would never show up and the fourth one said they wouldn’t even consider selling Kiwi Travel Air Charters.’’

We suddenly realised that I had offended just about every other travel agent in Hamilton because our retail travel agency, Kiwi Travel International, had discounted seats by accepting lower commissions. This had started a price war between all the retail agents and they weren’t going to support me because of that.

As far as the industry was concerned I was an upstart and a "real bastard". The travel agents believed that in supporting our charter flights they would be propping up our travel agency, which was in direct competition.

Added to that, we had a suspicion that Air New Zealand and Qantas were leaning on the agents, saying, "You wouldn’t dare sell Kiwi, would you?"

And the agents would say, "Absolutely not." The airlines have denied they tried to influence the agents, and it wasn’t too heavy- handed in the beginning because Air New Zealand and Qantas thought we were a joke. And many of the Hamilton retail agents disliked us anyway.

Further out from Hamilton I believe the travel agents adopted a more professional approach. In Tauranga, Rotorua and other parts of the Bay of Plenty and the King Country the travel agents didn’t think about what Ewan Wilson used to do. He’d started what others were calling a budget airline but what he described as "an affordable alternative".

"The passengers want it. The public want it. I’m a travel agent. I’m a service provider. I put a sign up, and I have a licence. If someone walks into my office I have an obligation. They want to go Brisbane? I have to quote them Air New Zealand, Qantas, Eva Air, Freedom, and Kiwi International. And if they say, ‘I want to book Kiwi,’ what do I do? I’m a professional travel agent. I book Kiwi. If they want to book Freedom, I book Freedom."

Those travel agents identified it, and we have always had good support from the outer regions of the Waikato and the Bay of Plenty.

In Dunedin, we’ve always had huge support, and that has come through the travel agents. Our general sales agent in Dunedin, Winston Darling, was a true blue travel agent. He has walked and talked travel from day one. I liked Winston, but he drove me crazy. It’s true. Winston irritates me, but he produces.

His advice was, "Ewan, the only way Kiwi is going to make it in Dunedin is to go through the travel agents."

My view was, "Bugger the industry. They’ve done nothing for us."

Winston said, "Trust me." And he was right. The industry was incredibly supportive in the South Island. So Dunedin was very, very different.

It’s the same in Australia. Most travel agents sold Kiwi. Some didn’t, and loudly said they wouldn’t. I think it is true they got huge override commissions. And some would have had disrupted passengers. If you have a disrupted passenger on Air New Zealand, the agents say, "That’s airline business." If you have a passenger disrupted by Kiwi, it’s, "Bugger the new carrier. They must be a Mickey Mouse operation."

We got good support from the industry in Australia. But we could have been better. After eighteen months most of the travel agents totally swung around.

When Freedom came out and capped the commission on ticket sales, they really upset the industry. A lot of the agents saw it as Air New Zealand feeling their way about to see how the industry would react to capped commissions, to see if they could get away with that.

Kiwi’s situation was different. The agents didn’t want to sell Kiwi, although we wanted them to. Kiwi’s philosophy didn’t change, really. We always wanted our seats filled. But how they were filled, at the end of the day, didn’t really concern me. We had the infrastructure for passengers to book direct.

But I would have been happy if Mrs Smith could walk into a licensed travel agent anywhere around the world and say, "I want to book Kiwi." All I wanted was for agents to represent us fairly. Some of our flights might have run a little late sometimes, but so does every other airline’s.

If they are fair, there will always be room for agents in the industry. But if they’re not, they will become extinct. What it meant for us, back then, was that we were in for a hard slog.

We had decided to do four flights to Brisbane, starting 28 August 1994. The pressure was on. We changed our marketing approach, and went direct to the consumer. People voted with their bottoms. Five days later, the flights were full. We were astounded. However, if we thought that was the end of our problems, we were mistaken. They had only just started.

What we thought was a major hurdle – the licensing problems – disappeared. As Polynesian Airlines was an existing operator it had all of the licences and our charters were approved. We then had to deal with the scepticism out at Hamilton Airport.

The light at the end of the tunnel was Hamilton Airport chief executive, Barry O’Connor. On the day the first story was published in the Waikato Times about the proposed charter flights I realised that I had not yet called Barry to tell him about my plans. Andrea Fox, who was onto the story, called Barry before I did, and asked him what he thought about the concept. When I eventually got through to him I said, "Barry, you won’t know who I am. My name’s Ewan Wilson, and I intend to operate international flights into your airport, in about three months’ time."

And he just said, "Great." I nearly fell off my seat.

Barry, an old politician, is no dummy. He was a highly successful farmer and a well-regarded politician. After missing out on the Waipa District mayoralty he joined the airport company as chief executive. Obviously he realised charter flights had the potential to become big business. The downstream effect for the local economy was just huge.

Barry, I know, worked incredibly hard to convince the airport board of directors to invest the dollars required to put in the facilities we needed. The airport directors were mindful of the Invercargill experience, where mayor Tim Shadbolt encouraged the southerners to spend half a million dollars setting up facilities for charter flights into Invercargill that never eventuated.

They were determined that Hamilton Airport would not end up with a white elephant like Invercargill Airport. Five days away from our first charter flight nothing had happened out at the airport.

On day four the builders arrived with their tools and began work on the makeshift facilities that were to greet Hamilton’s first international passengers.

All through this time, rumours were buzzing about the state of Polynesian Airlines. Rumours about Polynesian Airlines were not new, but the updated versions had Polynesian going broke and having their aeroplanes repossessed. (In fact, one of the airplanes was repossessed.)