First solo flight videos - Jennifer Green and Solveig Eike. Well done !

".. fuel pump on, my mixture's rich, my flaps are down ...and you gotta keep right in the centre ....and now at 60 so up we go..a little right rudder as the propeller likes to torque you left ...."

Jennifer said.."I was about to have a heart attack. Solo day is frightening to say the least..."
 You did well Jen!

Farnborough 2016 B727 Oil Spill Response

Launched and displaying at the Farnborough Air Show during the weekend of 16-17 July.  I used to dispatch B727 with Air France during the 1980s. We operated the first UK-CDG departure of the day at 06:30, sometimes with just 6 passengers on board! Although on busy days this would be at least 166 passengers IIRC. These new newly out-fitted B727s must though must be two of the very few B727s still flying in the UK today. It's role is to disperse oil spills via a spraying system and tanks of dispersant in its fuselage. It can be called out very quickly to deal with emergencies.

OSR have two B727s on strength, G-OSRA and OSRB. Both are ex-FedEx and both painted at Air Livery Manchester. 'RB was in fact the last B727 constructed.

" ....The aircraft, two Boeing 727-SS2F (RE), are now central to OSRL’s aerial dispersant capability and will be officially launched during this year’s Farnborough International Airshow, 11th – 17th July 2016. Fitted with internal tanks, pumps and a spray boom to deliver dispersant liquid, the specially adapted Boeing 727-2S2F (RE) aircraft are truly a first-of-a-kind capability for the oil and gas industry. The Valsan engined 727-2S2F (RE) proved to be an ideal aircraft for OSRL, offering greater stability, adaptability and an almost unrivalled power to weight ratio. "OSRL’s main requirement was to acquire a more up-to-date asset that could travel further and faster than its extant capability offered by the organisation’s L-382 Hercules” says Andy Offer, former RAF Harrier and Red Arrows pilot, the Owner and Director of 2Excel Aviation Ltd...." via OSR.com

Above and below; two from Neil Cotten seen during Saturday's display

More screen captures via planesTV.com live coverage

" ..The Boeing 727 is highly distinctive because of its three engines and a high T-Tail design. The middle engine, or engine 2, is stationed at the very rear of the fuselage and obtains air from an inlet ahead of the vertical fin through an S-shaped duct.

...The aircraft has a built-in Auxiliary Power Unit (APU), which is mounted in a hole in the keel beam web in the main landing gear bay. This allows the aircraft to have power for electrical and air-conditioning and not to have the main engines running while sitting on the ground; the APU is also used to restart the engines.

..To be able to use the required shorter runways the Boeing 727 has a unique wing design. With no wing-mounted engines, leading-edge devices (Krueger, or hinged, flaps on the inner wing and extendable leading edge slats out to the wingtip) and trailing-edge lift enhancement equipment (triple-slotted, aft-moving flaps) can be used on the entire wing. Together these high-lift devices produced a maximum wing lift coefficient of 3.0 (based on the flap-retracted wing area).
The 727 is very stable at very low speeds compared to other early jets. A key feature is the aircraft’s ability to use a very short runway. The nose wheel brakes are available as an option to reduce braking distance on landing which provides reductions in braking distances of up to 150m. Another important feature is that the 727 is equipped with a retractable tail skid that is designed to protect the aircraft in the event of an over-rotation on take-off..." via OSR.com

DC 10 firefighting tanker dropping retardant -aeronautical insanity (4)

Tanker 911 seen in action over a Californian fire a few days ago. '911' is a DC 10 firefighting tanker - a converted airliner carrying an external tank- used to drop fire retardant over high ridges in southern California. The DC 10 carries some 11,600 gallons per load. The company operating the DC 10s - 10 Tanker Air Carrier - claims the DC 10 can carry up to four times more retardant than any other firefighting aircraft. The 'tank' itself is positioned along the centre line, is V-shaped and gravity fed. 10 Tanker recently began an exclusive use contract with CalFire for the remainder of the 2016 fire season. Tanker 910 will be flying on the contract, and will be based near Sacramento at McClellan Air Park

Piper almost lands on sunbather or 'idiot sunbathing at the end of an active runway' -aeronautical insanity (3)

A man stretched out on the sand in northern Germany had a lucky escape when a light aircraft came in to land almost right on top of him. Video footage obtained by German tabloid newspaper Bild showed the small plane, a Piper PA-28-181 Archer II, coming in to land on the airstrip at Dune – a touristic islet off Heligoland. The pilot descended towards the airstrip, but got increasingly close to the white sands – and the man lying face down beneath him. "I was watching the planes come into land," said Rainer Schmidt, 52, who shot the video. "I had seen five planes land before this one came in. I instantly realised that this one was coming in to land far too low. "The others were at least six metres high. It was so close to the man on the beach. The man was very lucky."

French flying boats of WWII - the Latécoère 631 six-engined flying boat- Biscarosse

.. The Latécoère 631 was a large six-engined flying boat conceived in France during the years leading up to WWII. The first machine constructed was confiscated by the Germans and transferred to Lake Constance. According to some sources it was destroyed here on 17 April 1944 by Mosquitos, wearing German codes 63+11 (along with SE-200, 2D+UT as reported in Aérojournal issue No. 4, Jan '99, 'Dans le service de l'ennemi')....rare Ebay.de image below

 The second Latécoère 631 F-BANT (no.2) is perhaps notable chiefly for the fact that it was 'hidden' by the French in the Toulouse area during WW II and re-assembled post-war for its first flight. Contrary to some accounts however the aircraft was not hidden 'secretly' - but rather with the knowledge of the Germans. This was chiefly to protect it from Allied bombing raids. Following the liberation of France the stocked parts were re-assembled and F-BANT first flew from Biscarosse on 15 March 1945. The reasons behind this project re-launch were chiefly 'political' in nature - to give the impression, at whatever the cost, that the French still had an aeronautical industry. But ultimately like most large flying boats of the period, the type was a huge white elephant. Air France never wanted it but had to fly it for reasons of national prestige as the national airline. More than 100 deaths followed in crashes and technical incidents concerning the type, mostly to do with the little-understood oscillatory phenomena of six unsynchronised engines on such a large wing - for example, on 01 November 1945 off Montevideo at 330 km/h an inboard prop sheared off the "Lionel de Marnier" F-BDRC tearing a huge hole in the fuselage, killing one passenger instantly and amputating the legs of another, who later died of his injuries. The aircraft put down safely despite losing another two props!  War-time technical advances had left the French far behind and by the time of the Late 631's first Air France transatlantic service in August 1947, TWA Constellations had been regularly crossing the Atlantic at over 400 km/h (cruise) for at least 18 months prior to this date. On the night of July 31, 1948 "Lionel de Marnier" F-BDRC (Latécoère 631 number 06) owned by Air France was flying from Fort-de-France to Port-Etienne in Mauritania when it disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of all 52 on board. It is believed to have gone down around 1200 miles from Dakar in Senegal. The U.S. Coast Guard ship Campbell reported finding debris on August 4 but no sign of survivors. 

Ten of these huge machines were built - half were lost to accidents. By way of comparison the Late 631 had a mTOW of around 70 T (9,600 hp) and could carry some 50 passengers and freight at 300 km/h. The much smaller Boeing 314 with a TOW of 38 T (6,400hp) could transport 25 passengers at 300 km/h. With its 57 metre wingspan it is still the biggest aircraft ever constructed by the French..

More on Biscarosse and the Late seaplanes on this blog here
http://falkeeinsgreatplanes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/biscarosse-home-to-pierre-georges.html

Artwork and internal views and French newspaper cuttings 


http://latecoere631.blogspot.co.uk/

Landung auf dem Rotem Platz - Cessna to Red Square, the notorious flight of Mathias Rust

German Mathias Rust made headlines in May 1987 as a 19-year-old when he flew a Cessna 172 all the way to Moscow via Iceland and Helsinki, a flight that appears on at least one listing of the Top Ten most remarkable flights in the history of aviation. Although he was shadowed for part of the trip by a Russia MiG 23, since the shootdown of the Korean B747 the Soviet air defences required high level authorisations to intercept civilian 'intruders' and the assumption must be that this incursion was not felt to warrant such measures - until it was too late. Rust was sentenced to four years in a Soviet labour camp and served 432 days before returning to Hamburg in 1988. Rust described his motives for undertaking the flight in a later interview with the Guardian newspaper;

".. I was 19 and very political. I was interested in relations between East and West, particularly the Reykjavik meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan. I realised that the aircraft was the key to peace. I could use it to build an imaginary bridge between East and West. I didn't tell anybody about my plan because I was convinced my family or friends would stop me. I didn't think much about what would happen afterwards. My main focus was on my mission to get there and land. I believed that something would work out..."

" For Rust, the flight was going flawlessly. He had no problem identifying the landmarks he had chosen as waypoints, and he was confident that his goal was within reach. “I had a sense of peace,” he says. “Everything was calm and in order.” He passed the outermost belt of Moscow’s vaunted “Ring of Steel,” an elaborate network of anti-aircraft defenses that since the 1950s had been built up as a response to the threat of U.S. bombers. The rings of missile placements circled the city at distances of about 10, 25, and 45 nautical miles, but were not designed to fend off a single, slow-flying Cessna. At just after 6 p.m., Rust reached the outskirts of Moscow. The city’s airspace was restricted, with all overflights—both military and civilian—prohibited. At about this time, Soviet investigators would later tell Rust, radar controllers realized something was terribly wrong, but it was too late for them to act..."   (Tom Lecompte - The notorious flight of Mathias Rust)

“At first, I thought maybe I should land inside the Kremlin wall, but then I realized that although there was plenty of space, I wasn’t sure what the KGB might do with me,” he remembers. “If I landed inside the wall, only a few people would see me, and they could just take me away and deny the whole thing. But if I landed in the square, plenty of people would see me, and the KGB couldn’t just arrest me and lie about it. So it was for my own security that I dropped that idea.”.

Rust flew a few cicuits around  Red Square before putting down on a wide bridge.

"..As he circled, Rust noticed that between the Kremlin wall and the Hotel Russia, a bridge with a road crossed the Moscow River and led into Red Square. The bridge was about six lanes wide and traffic was light. The only obstacles were wires strung over each end of the bridge and at its middle. Rust figured there was enough space to come in over the first set of wires, drop down, land, and then taxi under the other wires and into the square. Rust came in steeply, with full flaps, his engine idling. As planned, he came in over the first set of wires, dropped down, and flared for landing. As he rolled out under the middle set of wires, Rust noticed an old Volga automobile in front of him. “I moved to the left to pass him,” Rust says, “and as I did I looked and saw this old man with this look on his face like he could not believe what he was seeing. I just hoped he wouldn’t panic and lose control of the car and hit me.”  (Tom Lecompte - The notorious flight of Mathias Rust)

Rust in his red flying overalls handed out autographs and chatted to passers-by in Red Square - before being arrested !

Der Kreml-Flug von Mathias Rust sorgte weltweit für Schlagzeilen   - Mathias Rust's Kremlin flight  resulted in headlines worldwide (screen grab from NDR Fernsehen Tageschau of 29 May 1987)

http://www.ndr.de/land_leute/norddeutsche_geschichte/rustchronologie100.html

Rust returned to Hamburg the following summer having been pardoned by the Russians and released on 3 August 1988, a benevolent action hailed by the then West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Rust's aircraft had been flown back to Germany as early as October 1987 having been bought by a businessman for DM160,000. Cessna D-ECJB is currently on display at the Deutches Technik Museum in Berlin. (photo credit Skyhawk)

The best account of Rust's flight that I have read was written by Tom Lecompte and published on the Air & Space Smithsonian web site

Disclaimer - images used on this private non-commercial blog are reproduced here solely for the purposes of depicting an historic event, the incursion of Mathias Rust's airplane into Soviet restricted airspace and his landing in Red Square, and as such may fall into the category of fair-use under copyright law. If such is deemed necessary, they can be removed by simple request.