Plane Tales

The 12 days of Christmas are generally thought to run from the 26th of December to the 6th of January and is an important period of religious celebration or for those of us who observe Christmas in a more secular manner, it’s more likely to be a traditional time of recovery following our holiday excesses and to welcome in the New Year. Of course, those of us in the Aviation industry often remember dates by events that occurred on a particular day and the most memorable are often the most tragic.  With that in mind I present the 12 crashes of Christmas.

The TU144

Earthrise from Apollo 8

The Lockheed A-12 Oxcart

The C-130

The Avro Ten

The Vickers Wellington

The Handley Page O

The captured bomber

Gustav Hamel and Eleanor Trehawke Davies

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man

The Flying Machine

The Convair 440 Metropolitan airliner

Amelia Mary Earhart

Earhart’s Electra

Amy Johnson

A Finnish Fokker

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Michel Gilliand, NASA, the USAF, State Library of Queensland, the RAF, US National Archives, the Rijksmuseum, Luc Viatour, SDASM,and those images within the Public Domain.

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier was one of two men who left the earth’s surface and flew in Montgolfier’s balloon for the very first time. He also designed a type of balloon that was given his name that flew using a combination of a lifting gas and hot air. More than 200 years later, his design would be used in the balloon that made the first non stop round the world flight.

A Rozièr balloon

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier in a Montgolfier balloon

De Rozièr perishes in a baloon crash over Wimereux

Don Cameron led the way in record breaking and unusual balloon design

Double Eagle II

Virgin Flyer

The successful balloon circumnavigation by Piccard and Jones

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to those Public Domain images available, NASA, the Smithsonian,The Virgin Group, Cameron balloons and Breitling.

Each year upwards of 2 million of the faithful make the journey to follow the path of the profit Muhammad to a number of holy sites before their pilgrimage rites are considered complete. Muslims from around the world make this journey which, in modern times, is often completed using air travel, as it was in 1991 when Nigeria Airways wet leased a Douglas DC8 operated by Nationair Canada to help them cope with the season’s increase in passenger traffic due to the Hajj. Under the hot sun of the Arabian desert, the scene was set for a disaster.

A Nationair DC8

King Abdulaziz International airport in Jeddah

The Maintenance Record analysis

The DC8 gear

A typical brake fire

Excerpt from the accident report

Excerpt from the accident report

Conditions in the cabin became unsurvivable

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Pedro Aragão, Yousefmadari, ICAO and the USAF.

They were the pioneers who trod the territory beyond the sound barrier… a place no man had ever been before and which had killed many who attempted the journey. The rocket powered, winged bullet first flew only 42 years after man’s first powered flight, an achievement that still astounds me. To think that a toddler around at Kitty Hawk who saw one of the Wright Brothers first flights, could have heard the world’s first man made sonic boom before they reached the ripe old age of 50 is a true testament to the ability of America’s finest minds and the bravery of their greatest pilots.

The Bell X1 in flight

The Miles M52

The X Planes

US Military astronaut wings

The X2 drop

The X2 crash

The X15

An X15 launch

Armstrong with the X15

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to NASA, the RAF, the USAF, NPRC,

It’s time for another of my flying logbook tales and it’s May 1987 and I’m on the Australian FA18 No 2 Operational Conversion Unit at RAAF Williamtown starting the final phase on course 1 of 87 before moving onto No 77 Squadron which was to be my home for the next few years.

An FA/18B with a pair of BDU33 practice bomb carriers

The Salt Ash bombing range

A practice bomb strikes the centre of the target

The CCIP aiming symbology

Mk 82 500lb General Purpose bombs

RAAF Townsville

Mk82s hitting the target on Cordelia Island

Course graduation

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the Welcome Collection and the USAF.

A tribute to Sherman Smoot, friend of the APG Show, who died doing what he loved best… flying.

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Capt Nick Anderson.

The First World War battle of the Somme continues, to this day, to fascinate and appal in equal measures. Much has been written about the ground war the first day of which saw the greatest number of British casualties than had occurred before in the entire history of the British Army… 19,240 were dead and 38,230 injured. The fighting over a 16 mile front lasted almost 5 months, after which the Allied troops had advanced about 6 miles. The butchers bill of casualties was horrendous. The combined Commonwealth countries number reached nearly 60,000 but was dwarfed by the United Kingdom’s casualty number of over 350,000. The battle opened on the 1st of July 1916 with a massed explosion that ranks amongst the largest non nuclear explosions in history and was then considered the loudest human made sound to date, audible beyond London 160 miles away.  It was witnessed by an 18 year old RFC pilot.

The mine under Hawthorn Ridge

Then the dust cleared and we saw the two white eyes of the craters

Going over the top

The la Boisselle mine crater now and then.

Pip’s landing

The Fokker Eindecker

Bristol Fighters

A dogfight

The battlefield

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to British First World War Air Service Photo Section, Ernest Brooks, Henry Armytage Sanders, H. D. Girdwood, the RFC and the IWM.

Robin Olds was a hard drinking, hard working man who led from the front in a way that inspired his men to become a great fighting force. He only became frustrated when he saw mistakes being made by those above him who should have known better and he went out of his way to make his feelings known. He defined what it meant to be a fighter pilot, not only in the air but on the ground with the stunningly beautiful Hollywood actress, Ella Raines, the first of his 4 wives.

The court-martial of General William “Billy” Mitchell 1925

West Point students

A P-38 Lightning

A digital representation of SCAT II

A Bf109

Olds and his P51 Mustang SCAT VI

A P80 Shooting Star

The Gloster Meteor

An F86 Sabre of the 71st, Hat in the Ring Sqn

The F4 Phantom

Robin Olds completes his 100th combat mission

Robin Olds in Vietnam after his 4th Mig kill

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to those images in the Public Domain, the Bundesarchive, the USAF, Digital Combat Simulator, Ruffneck88, USAF National Museum and RuthAS.

A recent news programme caught my eye when I realised it involved our great friends at the Farnborough Aviation Sciences Trust museum. It reminded me of the group of sadistic so-called doctors who populated the Institute of Aviation Medicine and tortured generations of unsuspecting and innocent RAF aircrew in machines such as the one the article featured, a centrifuge! This aforementioned device which resembles a vast witch’s ducking stool crossed with an iron maiden, first operated in 1955 but was decommissioned as recently as 2019 and has now received Grade 2 protection.

The Institute of Aviation Medicine

The Farnborough Centrifuge

The Cecil Hotel with it’s red and white ornate frontage

The august medical journal, the Lancet

Early versions of oxygen masks

An early mobile decompression chamber

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the RAF, FAST museum, The Library of Congress, those images within the Public Domain and the National Museum of Health & Medicine.

The story of my military flying career continues with the new challenge of flying the FA/18 Hornet round the beautiful skies of Australia.

The official crest of No 77 Sqn RAAF with its Grumpy Monkey

The 77 Sqn Mirages

The helmet fitting

An FA/18A cockpit

Sunset

The Head Up Display

The location of RAAF Williamtown

Firing the gun

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Nick Anderson and Google Earth.