by Nick Anderson | Feb 15, 2022 | Plane Tales
Podcast (pt): Download
Instead of a cargo of bored business men and excited holiday makers, this aged DC-10 was carrying 12,000 gallons, thats 45,000 ltrs of bright red liquid in a huge tank attached to the centre of the fuselage. This is the story of the fire fighting water bombers.
A vast DC10 converted to flying tanker operations
A forest fire
Mixing fire retardant
A fire lookout
The Morton Lake hotshots
The dangers of a wildfire are considerable, even during an evacuation
The dangers of manoeuvring a big aircraft at low level are considerable
Other aircraft are converted into water bombers like this PBY-6A Catalina
Helicopters deliver water from buckets
One of the few purpose built water bombers, the Canadair Superscooper
The magnificent Mars water bomber
Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the USAF, John McColgan, signal mirror, DarrenRD, Tim Peterson, the USN, SSgt Ed Drew, Pierre Bona and Alex Juorio.
by Nick Anderson | Jan 26, 2022 | Plane Tales
Podcast (pt): Download
On the last tale, Sidewinders and Sparrows we talked a little about the history of rockets and missiles but it’s a big subject so this week I thought I’d expand on the theme a little and as I’m going to mention lots of rattlesnakes and sparrows, I should probably use the correct collective nouns… rhumbas and quarrels!
Rules of Engagement
JTIDS
The result of a Blue on Blue engagement
An AIM 54 Phoenix launch
An AIM7 Sparrow in flight
The APG63 radar
Radar discrimination
AIM7 Sparrow missiles on an F15 Eagle
Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the USAF, USN, Daderot and the DOD Media.
by Nick Anderson | Jan 18, 2022 | Plane Tales
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Despite their obvious differences, Sidewinders and Sparrows often went together because they aren’t just the names of flying creatures and slithering serpents… they are weapons of war.
The Sidewinder
House Sparrows
The Rapier missile system
Chinese Fire Arrows
The Tipu Sultan’s artillery rockets
The RS-28 rockets fired by the Polikarpov I-16
The German R4M unguided air to air rocket
The nuclear AIR-2 Genie missile
A Genie launch
The AIM9 Sidewinder
The rotating reticule
The rolleron
Guidance
The warhead
An AIM 9 warhead effect demonstration
The AIM7 Sparrow
A QF4B killed by a Sparrow missile
Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to images in the Public Domain, UK Defence Imagery, Wubei Zhi, NASA, Juergen Schiffmann, the USAF, David Monniaux, RoyKabanlit, U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation and the USN.
by Nick Anderson | Jan 6, 2022 | Plane Tales
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It was New Year’s Day, 2007 and the 96 passengers booked on Adam Air Flight 574 from Java to Sulawesi boarded their Boeing 737-4Q8 for their 2 hour trip. The Indonesian government had adopted a policy of deregulation in the country’s aviation industry which had resulted in a boom of start-up airlines, many of which were low cost carriers. This decision wasn’t matched with an equivalent ramp up of government supervision and control… the result was fierce commercial competition amongst the new airlines with little or no oversight.
Competition amongst the many start up low cost airlines was fierce.
The incident Adam Air Boeing 737, ready for boarding.
An Adam Air B737 taxies out.
Debris from the flight is washed up.
The USN ship Mary Sears.
Adam Air flight 172.
Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to FLasset for logo, marlborotosca, Dmitriy Pichugin. the NTSB, the USN, the NTSC and ERRORHUNT.
by Nick Anderson | Dec 30, 2021 | Plane Tales
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Another installment of tales from my RAF logbook. I’m about halfway through my 4 year sentence at RAF Valley instructing those RAF pilots destined for the fast jet world. The first couple of years had been far from without incident and I should probably mention that I nearly lost my greatest friend to an accident but someone was watching over him that day and he survived.
Our great friend, Glen, a USAF exchange pilot.
Flying in the Hawk
The laying on of hands by Central Flying School
The Hawk T1 trainer
The horrible Spinning explanation
The laziest A1 QFI in existence
