Home above the Sounds

For three generations of the Marchant family, flying has never been just about planes, it’s been about quiet bays, open skies and the moments that make a place feel like home.

Words: Rachel Enright

Ask Cliff Marchant what he loves most about flying, and he does not start with aircraft types or technical details. He talks about landing somewhere remote in the Marlborough Sounds, shutting the engine down, and hearing nothing but bellbirds and seabirds carrying their songs across the water. It is a moment he has never tired of, no matter how many thousands of hours he has spent in the air.

Today, Cliff runs Pelorus Air, with several of his children involved in the business. His son Chris leads most of the operational flying, and his daughter Kaz manages safety and training. Their presence in the business feels natural. Aviation has simply always been part of the Marchant family, but its beginnings were much smaller.

Cliff was around five years old when he first knew he wanted to be a pilot. His family lived overlooking a tidal estuary in Tauranga, and one afternoon a Tiger Moth landed right there on the flats. Their house was only about a hundred metres away. Cliff ran to the fence and watched the pilot walk past carrying a broken part as he disappeared over the hill into town, returning a couple of hours later, a pie in one hand, the repaired part in the other. Cliff followed him back to the water and watched him hand-start the propeller.

“He just said, ‘See you, little fella’ and took off,” he says. “I never knew where he went, but that was the moment I knew I wanted to fly.”

He started lessons at sixteen through his school’s sixth-form programme, paying for flights with gardening jobs that earned sixty cents an hour. “You had to save up your pennies to be able to practise your flying,” he says. His father encouraged him to study something practical as a backup plan, so Cliff enrolled in surveying at university, but academic life did not hold. Flying did. He returned to it, earned his commercial licence and instrument rating in his early twenties, and joined the National Airways Corporation (NAC) before moving onto the DC-8 jet fleet after the merger with Air New Zealand.

“I like jobs with a clear start and finish,” he says. “Flying gives you that.”

In 1986, Cliff and his wife Diane bought a homestead in Port Gore as a holiday place. Before long they were living there full-time with their five children, who grew up on correspondence school, beach landings and long days in the outdoors. Cliff would often leave Port Gore in a small family aircraft to commute to Wellington for work, then fly long-haul routes to Australia, Japan or Hawaii. An hour after taking off from home, he would be passing overhead again at thirty thousand feet looking down at his family in the Sounds.

It was around this time they founded Sounds Air. When their first child was born, the plane needed to earn its keep, and selling it was never up for discussion. Cliff began using it to move cargo around the Sounds, then saw a larger opportunity. He and Diane built the runway at Picton and created Sounds Air, which grew steadily into a well-known regional airline.

As it expanded into larger airports and scheduled services, Cliff realised he missed the smaller, more remote strips where he had always felt most at home. He stepped back from the commercial side and returned to the kind of flying he enjoyed most. Pelorus Air emerged from that shift, created to keep serving the quiet bays and small airstrips scattered throughout the Sounds.

Growing up at Port Gore, Chris spent his childhood surrounded by engines, motorbikes, small aircraft and the constant hum of his dad’s work in the Sounds. He liked understanding how things functioned, taking them apart and putting them back together. When his mate from Titirangi planned to enrol in the NMIT aircraft engineering programme, Chris followed, beginning the two-year course at seventeen. That led to more than six years as an engineer with Air New Zealand in Christchurch, working on the domestic fleet.

It was solid, respected work, but he struggled with being indoors all day. “You’d look out the hangar door and it would be a beautiful day outside… and you’re stuck in there.” Eventually he made the difficult decision to leave. He moved home, bought a Cessna 172 with help from Cliff, and spent six months restoring it while studying for his Commercial Pilot Licence. He completed his CPL in Nelson while living in a tent on his brother Mike’s backyard lawn to help save money and be fully focused on flying.

Once qualified, he began flying with Cliff for Pelorus Air. “Those were the good days because it was just me and Dad flying around.” He gained confidence quickly, learning the subtleties of decision-making simply by watching how Cliff handled terrain, weather and the quirks of each airstrip in the Sounds.

But the dream that had tugged at him since childhood was floatplane flying. As a kid, Chris had cut floatplane pictures from aviation magazines and stuck them to his wall. No one in the family flew floats, but he was drawn to them. In 2017 he went to Canada, converting his licence and flying a season in the remote Northwest Territories. A second season on Vancouver Island followed, living in a caravan beside a floatplane base with his partner Aleasha, and in 2023 he returned for a final season above the Arctic Circle, gaining experience few New Zealand pilots ever acquire.

One of the Marchant aircraft that Cliff had bought back in 1989 was built with provisions for floats. After years of talking about it, Chris and Cliff finally ordered a set. Working as a trained engineer and with help from the Sounds Air engineering team, he converted the land plane into a fully amphibious aircraft capable of operating from both water and runways. It now flies scenic routes and remote landings throughout the Sounds.

Pelorus Air remains a family-centred business. Cliff still flies regularly. Chris now handles most commercial operations and pilot training. Kaz oversees the safety systems that hold everything together. Other Marchant siblings work across aviation in New Zealand and overseas.

For all of them, flying has never been about the image of aviation or the machinery itself. It has always been about place. The Sounds has shaped three generations of the Marchant family. It gave Cliff his earliest adventures, gave the children their childhood, and now provides the backdrop for the work they do together.

Today, Chris and his partner Aleasha are raising their young family in Blenheim. Their two daughters already notice planes overhead. Chris introduces them to the cockpit gently, choosing clear days and unhurried flights so their early memories of aviation are joyful ones, not intimidating.

Ask Cliff why he is still flying after all these years, and the answer is as simple as the moment he described at the start.

“You land somewhere out in the Sounds and turn the engine off,” he says. “It is just silence and birdsong. That is the part I still love.”

Pelorus Air continues to connect remote corners of the region, but the heart of it remains simple: a family who fell in love with the quiet magic of flying.

A childhood dream realised – Chris now owns and flies his own floatplane in the Sounds.