Plane Tales

The Right Hand Traffic Rule stated that an aircraft which was flying within the United Kingdom in sight of the ground and following a road, railway, canal or coastline, or any other line of landmarks shall keep such line of landmarks on its left.  For reasons that defeat me the rule went on to give an exception stating, “provided that this rule shall not apply to a helicopter following the Motorway M4 on a route from West Drayton to Osterley Lock!”  Let me take you back to the the birth of commercial aviation in Europe after the First World War.Daimler Airways operated the De Havilland aircraft on the Croydon to Paris route and Grands Express were operating the same route, albeit originating from Paris. The scene was therefore set and, no doubt the astute amongst you will already be speculating on what befell the Daimler Airway mail flight departing Croydon on the 7th of April 1922 and the Grand Express aircraft that left Le Bourget on the same day, just after noon.  This is that story.

The Farman Goliath airliner

The DH18

The BAS 500cc single Gold Star

London to Le Bourget

Le Bourget to London

Traffic in France drove on the right hand side

On that fateful day, the weather was poor

The Picardie accident was the world’s first mid air collision between airliners

Images shown under the Creative Commons licence with thanks to Albert Thuloup, Handley Page, BP, SADSM, The Library of Congress and Popular Mechanics.

Traditionally the phrase Brass Monkeys goes hand in hand with weather so cold that only a naughty sounding description like, “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” will suffice.  If, however, you were the crew member a NATO aircraft in Europe during the tense times of the Cold War, Brass Monkeys meant something very specific!  It was a code phrase that everyone knew of and listened out for on the Guard frequency just in case it was broadcast.  Two or three minutes into the flight Rikki was super-sonic and climbing through twenty thousand feet or so when the first “Brass Monkeys” call came over the radio: “Brass monkeys, brass monkeys, aircraft heading east at high speed fifty miles east of Gutersloh, brass monkeys”. He ignored it!

The true origin of Brass Monkeys has been lost in time

The identification papers of defector Viktor Belenko

Map of the East/West German airspace

An F84

West German Navy Sea Hawk

A Lightning F3 landing

Mig 21s chasing

Returning safely

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Louis-Philippe Crépin, images in the Public Domain, the CIA, the RAF, Rosario Van Tulpe, Milborne One and Mike Freer.

Life on 77 Squadron had settled down to a routine, if it ever really could on a fighter squadron. There was certainly plenty of variety to our flying. In one month I flew some practice bombing attacks, both day and night, on the Evans Head weapon’s range north by 230 nm. This was followed by a 4 ship formation demonstration of ground attack on our own airfield as part of an Open Day celebration for the public.  Then night radar bombing on the Beecroft range at Jarvis bay about 150 nm south. Then we bombed and sank a tug boat before flying off to New Zealand.

The Squadron hours board

A head on view of the FA18A

Our Hornets in close formation

A MK82 low drag general purpose bomb

A 77 Sqn Hornet landing

RNZAF Strikemasters AKA the Bluntie

The RNZAF A4 Skyhawk

Landing at Ohakea

My old buddy John

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Myself and Greenshed.

Marvin and Rebecca’s first two flights of the day were cancelled due to high winds at Newark so they both waited in the crew room until their company dispatch released them for flight 3407 at 6pm, 4 and a half hours after their initial report time.  Certainly for Rebecca, it had been a long time since she had done more than nap in a chair.  Their flight to Buffalo was due to take 53 minutes and they were carrying 45 passengers which, along with their two cabin attendants meant that they had 49 souls onboard their Q400 aircraft. The pilots’ performance was likely impaired because of fatigue but to what extent could not be conclusively determined.  However, they boiled down to the flight crew’s failure to monitor airspeed, the flight crew’s failure to adhere to sterile cockpit procedures, the Captain’s failure to effectively manage the flight and Colgan Air’s inadequate procedures for airspeed selection, management during approaches in icing conditions and training.  This is the story of Colgan Air Flight 3407.

A Bombardier Q400

The SAAB 340

The DH Dash 8

Examples of wing icing

Stills from the NTSB accident report

Stills from the NTSB accident report

Stills from the NTSB accident report

The wreckage of Flight 3407

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Lord of the Wings, Bill Abbott, Steve Fitzgerald, NASA and the NTSB.

With thanks to listener Sam Dawson who has such interesting relatives and to Betty Goerke, the author of a book about Baz Bagby, A Broken Propeller. I am pleased to present the story of Sam Dawson’s Great Uncle Baz.

Stunt pilot Lincoln Beachey at Niagara

The 1st Aero Squadron

Early Aerial Reconnaissance

The 88th Aero Squadron

General Billy Mitchell

The start of the Great Transcontinental Air Race

Great Uncle Baz

Images under creative commons licence with thanks to the Library of Congress, the USAAC, the USAF, the RFC, the US Army, the National Archives and SADSM.

The continuation of my log book tales, otherwise known as RAF Form 414, and we are up to Volume 20.  Apart from other asides, this tale deals with my accidental overflight of a very secret satellite surveillance base run by the Australians and the CIA!

Overflying Uluru (Ayres Rock)

My arrival at Alice Springs airport

My ‘circumnavigation’ of Australia

My aircraft being impounded on arrival at RAAF Pearce

Seeing my father at the 1881 Resturant

The Great Australian Bight

Passing through RAAF Edinburgh

Looking back through the fins

Heading home to Williamtown

Images under creative commons licence with thanks to Myself, Nachoman-au and Google Earth.

The DC-10 was McDonnell Douglas’s first commercial airliner project since the merger between McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. It started life on the drawing boards as a 4 engined, double decked, wide body airliner that could carry 550 passengers but morphed into single deck, three engined aircraft that could carry one passenger short of 400!  In what was expected to be a knockout blow to the competing Lockheed L-1011, the President of American Airlines and James McDonnell of McDonnell Douglas announced American Airlines’ intention to acquire the DC-10. Flight 96 was en route between Detroit and Buffalo when, above the city of Windsor in Ontario whilst climbing through 11,750 ft the flight crew heard a distinct thud and dirt and debris flew up from the cockpit floor into their faces. On inspection it was obvious that the rear cargo door had detached from the aircraft.  This is the story of the DC-10 cargo door issue and the engineer who tried to warn the company of the dire problem.

The 4 Engined Douglas Proposal

The DC-10

The Cargo Door

The Cargo Door of Flight 96

The Accident Report of Turkish Airlines Flight 981

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the SDASM archives, the Douglas Aircraft Corp, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the FAA and the DOT AIB.

Telling the tale of my flying career, I left you at the end of my F/A18 conversion course as we reformed the No 77 Royal Australian Air Force Squadron with their brand new Hornets. So far our one and only aircraft A21-5 was being shared around and everyone wanted a piece of it, either to fly or learn how to fix it.  The squadron execs were pretty busy dealing with the job of getting the new squadron personnel squared away so the rest of us got more than our share of flying.  There wasn’t much we could do with a single jet but I was happy just to play with a multi million dollar toy and get used to my new home.

The M61A Vulcan Cannon

The ‘Pig’ Australian F111

My route around Australia

Mt Isa

Arriving at Darwin

Uluru through the HUD

Pine Gap

Alice Springs

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Peter Gronemann, General Dynamics, Fhrx, and Google Maps.

Hawaii became the most recent state to join the union in 1959 and is now the third wealthiest.  Following it’s annexation, Hawaii became an important naval base for the US Navy so it is hardly surprising that they should be the first to attempt a flight from the US mainland to the island.  Aviation had already arrived at the islands in 1910 courtesy of Bud Mars, the Curtiss Daredevil.

The Hawaiian Archipelago

The annexation of Hawaii

J C Mars

Commander John Rodgers

Rodgers in the Wright Flyer

The PN9 flying boat

Rodgers and his crew survive to be welcomed into Hawaii

The Atlantic-Fokker C-2 Tri-motor

Atlantic-Fokker C-2 “Bird of Paradise” arrival in Hawaii

The start of the Dole Air Race

In all, six aircraft were lost or damaged beyond repair and ten lives lost.

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Google Map Images, Bain News Service, Harris and Ewing, the Library of Congress, Hawaii Aviation, the USAF and the SDASM.

Images under Creatiove Commons licence with thanks to

It was the 13th of May 1912, a Monday, when a Flanders F3 Monoplane took off from Brooklands in Surrey, a county of England.  The pilot was the aviation pioneer Edward Victor Beauchamp Fisher and his passenger the American millionaire Victor Mason.  Fisher had an Aviator’s Certificate, the 77th to be issued, had learned to fly at Brooklands and was a flying instructor there.  He had also worked with both A V Roe (the founder of Avro) and Howard Flanders, whose monoplane he was flying at the time.  The two men had made two or three circuits of the airfield at about 100ft, the 60 hp Green engine operating well when, in a left turn, the aircraft fell to the ground killing both the aviator and his passenger before catching alight and burning.  In the early days of aviation such accidents were fairly common but what sets this one apart is that it was the first in history to become the subject of an accident investigation by an official civilian body… the Public Safety and Accidents Investigation Committee of the Royal Aero Club.

Brooklands airfield and motor racing circuit circa 1907

The Flanders F3/4

The Wright crash

Lt Frank Lahm

The 1920 Air Navigation Act

The 1926 formation of the NTSB

NTSB Investigators

The Challenger disaster

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Daimler Chrysler AG, Bain News Service, National Museum of Health and Medicine, the USAF, UK Gov, NTSB and the Kennedy Space Centre.