Look! Up there! In the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!

[whollygoats]

Heh....Likely I would be, too.

 

[Ford]

So, a long time ago on a ride along at an air show I got to do one of these:

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBAhWK4Ehno[/YOUTUBE]


It was cool. The Extra is an awesome aircraft.

I'd be puking...

There was an air sickness bag involved. And it came up (or down) at an interesting moment.

Before you go on one of these trips, you have to sign a release form, strap on a parachute, and as a courtesy you get an air sickness bag. I stuck it under my thigh to get it out of the way.

Then when we were inverted, the bag came loose and landed on the inside of the canopy. It was oddly hilarious.

 

[Worldtraveller]

So, a long time ago on a ride along at an air show I got to do one of these:

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBAhWK4Ehno[/YOUTUBE]


It was cool. The Extra is an awesome aircraft.

I'd be puking...

There was an air sickness bag involved. And it came up (or down) at an interesting moment.

Before you go on one of these trips, you have to sign a release form, strap on a parachute, and as a courtesy you get an air sickness bag. I stuck it under my thigh to get it out of the way.

Then when we were inverted, the bag came loose and landed on the inside of the canopy. It was oddly hilarious.

I did a full fighter combat weekend with these guys. It included nerly a full airshow routine, which I got to attempt several of the easier maneuvers. A tail slide is exceedingly difficult! I did manage to pull off the hammerhead quite nicely.

My videos are here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa2rEXCNODl9a7gLygpQbAA?view_as=subscriber

the highlight video, with full cheesy soundtrack: https://vimeo.com/190378148

During the fighter combat, my friend in the other plane spent of half of each flight with his face in the bag. I did fine, never had any issues, and we did some almost 6g pulls.

 

[Ford]

There was an air sickness bag involved. And it came up (or down) at an interesting moment.

Before you go on one of these trips, you have to sign a release form, strap on a parachute, and as a courtesy you get an air sickness bag. I stuck it under my thigh to get it out of the way.

Then when we were inverted, the bag came loose and landed on the inside of the canopy. It was oddly hilarious.

I did a full fighter combat weekend with these guys. It included nerly a full airshow routine, which I got to attempt several of the easier maneuvers. A tail slide is exceedingly difficult! I did manage to pull off the hammerhead quite nicely.

My videos are here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa2rEXCNODl9a7gLygpQbAA?view_as=subscriber

the highlight video, with full cheesy soundtrack: https://vimeo.com/190378148

During the fighter combat, my friend in the other plane spent of half of each flight with his face in the bag. I did fine, never had any issues, and we did some almost 6g pulls.

That's awesome! Just to be clear, I was just a passenger when we did the tail slide, though the pilot let me do some aileron rolls.

 

[Worldtraveller]

The guys at Fighter Combat are a client of mine (I'm an aerospace engineer and did some work for them to get their Marchetti S211 flying).

So....they offered me the 'employee discount' to do the fighter combat weekend, and that was just too good to pass up.

 

[whollygoats]

So....Sitting out on the balcony, enjoying the morning, when a couple of Eagles crossed my field of view, right to left.

The kids over at the state ANG are doing due diligence.

 

[whollygoats]

Working in the garden this morning, I looked up to identify the aerial noise as an unpainted DC-3 at about 1,000 ft.

 

[Worldtraveller]

Working in the garden this morning, I looked up to identify the aerial noise as an unpainted DC-3 at about 1,000 ft.

Nice. Love the Gooney!

I've got about 450 pictures from the big airshow last weekend to go through. I'll put some links in when I've got them done. (I'll be pretty busy the next few weekends, so don't hold your breath).

 

[Shake]

So....Sitting out on the balcony, enjoying the morning, when a couple of Eagles crossed my field of view, right to left.

The kids over at the state ANG are doing due diligence.

When I was stationed at Charleston AFB (now JB Charleston), there was a Vermont Guard unit which occupied a small 4-position hanger of F-16s, which as a "volunteer" Security Forces augmentee, I had several opportunities to sit in one of the shacks there to keep an eye on the aircraft. It was usually pretty quiet (read: boring AF), although I did have en excellent view of one of the runways as we were located just off one end of the main strip, but Charleston is a "heavy" base: we had C-141s and C-17s there. There were a few times when I was out there and had a front row seat to a pair of the F-16s scrambling off. They'd pull out on to the strip, go to full throttle and then release the brakes and go screaming away.

Charleston used to have C-5s apparently, so there's plenty of space there and they put on a pretty good airshow every year. That was where I first got to see an F-117 Nighthawk up close ... well, as close as they'd let you get, which was outside of a double-roped off area with a patrolling armed guard. Aircraft and crews would start coming in during the week prior to the show, and I recall seeing a B-1 come in during a work break (our building was right near the flightline. Those things are freakin' loud!

 

[whollygoats]

Working in the garden this morning, I looked up to identify the aerial noise as an unpainted DC-3 at about 1,000 ft.

Nice. Love the Gooney!

I've got about 450 pictures from the big airshow last weekend to go through. I'll put some links in when I've got them done. (I'll be pretty busy the next few weekends, so don't hold your breath).

I'm a big fan.

I did a weekend 'Dakota ground school' in nearby Aurora, where a renovator has his hangar, but I still have not managed to wrangle a ride. I'm looking to doing this one.

I'd also like to wrangle a ride on a Curtiss C-46 Commando, but I think I'm going to have to go to Yellowknife for that, and I don't know as they sell rides to rubes.

 

[Tharmas]

My first (fixed wing) flight was in a DC-3. I was about 12, so 1960 or so. The flight was a birthday present from my mom. I flew from Jamestown NY to Erie PA on Allegheny Airlines. Must have taken twenty minutes to half an hour. My mother drove and picked me up an hour or so later.

 

[Elixir]

Great thread, cool pix. But of all aircraft, here's one of my favs.

 

[fromderinside]

problem solver

 

[Worldtraveller]

You sometimes find cool aircraft in the most unexpected places.

There's a (very nice) racetrack in Wilcox, AZ, called Inde Motorsports Ranch. Unfortunately, it's private property, so there are no google street view images, but check out the collection of random aircraft the owner has put together (mostly Korean/Vietnam era).

Google maps view.

 

[whollygoats]

I found a modern day MiG alley in Krakow.....

Google maps view - Polish Air Museum, Krakow

Plus, a Viggen, a Draken, and a Mirage 2000, and a bona fide Li-2.

 

[Tharmas]

I found a modern day MiG alley in Krakow.....

Google maps view - Polish Air Museum, Krakow

Plus, a Viggen, a Draken, and a Mirage 2000, and a bona fide Li-2.

Oh man! I was in Krakow a few years back and never thought to look up an air museum.

However I did tour one in Romania, the National Military Museum where I saw this interesting replica of the 1910 Coanda biplane, which was the first example of a ducted fan.  Coanda-1910

Coanda later claimed it was a true jet, but that claim has been convincingly refuted. Nevertheless in 2010 Romania issued a medal and stamp to commemorate the centennial of the invention of the jet engine.

 

[whollygoats]

I'm assuming that the display was in Bucharest? If so, I missed it.

I didn't think of national air museums until I hit Budapest. But I managed to make it to Krakow's first. The one I visited in Budapest was a small set of commercial rigs near the airport....

 

[Tharmas]

I'm assuming that the display was in Bucharest? If so, I missed it.

I didn't think of national air museums until I hit Budapest. But I managed to make it to Krakow's first. The one I visited in Budapest was a small set of commercial rigs near the airport....

Yes, Bucharest. We had a guide there who, a veteran himself, took us to the National Military Museum, which had quite an extensive collection of military artifacts. I concentrated on the aircraft. The ones outside were not in great shape, but they had a nice collection under cover. Very eclectic. Here is Mrs. Tharmas with a Soyuz capsule.

 

[whollygoats]

Nice. We flew in to Bucharest after 14 hours flight and were pretty much out of it for days...until we boarded our ship in Constanta and headed up the Danube.

By the time we got to Belgrade, I remembered to look for air museums, but couldn't stop there.

I remembered in Budapest and had trouble tracking it down, as it had moved.

The Poles in Krakow accommodated me with 'MiG Alley' and a lot of mouldering Cold War remnants. The thing is, even though visitors were told not to climb on the static craft, we were allowed to get up close and touch. The commercial aircraft at the Budapest AeroPark each had stairs and visitors could troupe up and enter the planes. If you were lucky and it wasn't too crowded, you could get a seat in the cockpit. I have a pic of me in the pilot's seat of an Ilyushin IL-18. (I still have not mastered posting my own pix.) I also learned that there is a Linusov Li-2 somewhere in the Budapest region which not only flies, but sells rides to rubes (for reasonable central European rates), but I learned that my last full day in Budapest....*sigh*

 

[whollygoats]