Air New Zealand's fifth 214 seater Airbus A321NEO has been delivered with ZK-NNE MSN 8799 arriving into Christchurch before dawn 06 May 2019 as ANZ6098 from Kuala Lumpur and Cairns.
ZK-NNE first flew on 10 April 2019 under the manufacturer test registration of D-AVZF as AIB799A conducting a 4.5 hour flight from/to Finkenwerder. A second flight was undertaken two days later followed by a customer acceptance flight on 26 April 2019.
It departed for Muscat 02 May 2019 and spent two nights there before heading onto Kuala Lumpur for a night, then through to Cairns (crew change) and onto Christchurch.
This is the second New Zealand registered airliner to wear this particular identity. The first was Britten-Norman BN2A-2 Islander operated by Friendly Island Airways. With a MSN of 661, the Islander was first registered G-AZDL back in August 1971 and delivered to Cook Island Airways, Rarotonga as ZK-KHA in October 1973. It remained ZK-KHA when it moved to Tonga Air Services in December 1979 but following conversion to a BN2A-20 and change of ownership to Friendly Island Airways of Tonga in December 1985 it was re-registered ZK-NNE. It kept its ZK marks when the Tongan operator was changed to Royal Tongan Airways in June 1989 but was exported to Fiji in November that year to become DQ-FET flying for Fiji Air. It later went onto fly with Vanua Air Charter and Air Fiji before being withdrawn from service at Suva.
