Wellington Airport Cam

If you’re on the trail of the Hobbits and heading to New Zealand to get a Tolkien fix, Wellington Airport is not a bad place to fly into. Once you’ve landed and dropped your bags at your hotel, you’ll be within walking distance of some of the most impressive filming locations there are to be seen. Think the forests on Mount Victoria, Harcourt Park used as the Gardens of Isengard and the Hutt River which was, as all aficionados will know, renamed the River Anduin in the films.

Wellington International Airport, also called Rongotai Airport, doesn’t rank anywhere on the list of the world’s largest airports. It occupies less than three-hundred acres of ground on the Rongotai isthmus and has a single, one-thousand eight-hundred metre long runway. Walk into its one terminal and there’s no escaping the fact you’ve arrived in Hobbit land as you’ll be greeted by larger than life artworks suspended from the ceiling depicting creatures from the stories. That’s not a bad start to a stay when you’re a Middle Earth fan.

For those who are viewing this live feed because they’re aviation fans rather than Tolkien fans, here’s a few statistics to occupy your brain while you’re spotting planes. Wellington Airport caters for well over a hundred thousand aircraft annually which means in the region of six million passengers pass through its terminal every year. Those figures mean that while Wellington Airport may be on the small side as far as international airports go, it has the Hobbit factor and is the third busiest airport in the country. And the answer to the question any observant watcher of this cam will be asking is – yes. The control tower really does lean at an angle of 12.5º which is three times more tilted over than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.