Airline crews are equipped with tools like plastic handcuffs

They are anything but plastic on Air France! Try asking the guy I was fighting for three hours AFTER he was handcuffed on an Air France flight last year. I would not have wanted to wake up severly hung over from all the stuff he was taking with all the marks of the NOT plastic handcuffs on my arms.

Those two guys might not even have been shot down by Höhler. Could they have been “entertained” at some airfield Höhler was based at?? Shot down by someone else (probably) but a good photo oportunity with Höhler at his base??

I know I´m not helping very much:o

I was at Sharjah a little over a week ago. All the old stuff has now been cleared out and the airport looks empty. The operations that used to be at Sharjah have now been moved to Fujairah on the east coast of the Emerates and to sem extend to Ras el Khamah further north.

To give you an idea, here is a taster of what Fujairah looks like. This Il-18 is registered as EX-75466 and has National Paint titles on the lower left fuselage. National Paint is an airline that is suspected to be/have been associated with Victor Bout, the famous arms smuggler/blockade runner. Behind it you can see rows upon rows of AN-12´s and AN-24´s. This Il-18 is still flying.

Here is a photo of another Il-18 with suspected Victor Bout connections. It is EX-505 formerly (presently??) of Anikay Airlines. It is still a flyer.

Yet another Il-18 with dodgy past (and probably present). UP-I1801 of Mega Airlines yet another airline with suspected connections to Victor Bout! In the background Il-76´s are visible.

A general picture of the west side of the ramp.

This is ony a very small portion of the aircraft that are sitting around this airport. I would not be surprised if there were close to 100 aircraft sitting around there!

Proctor,
We have different point of view here. Mr. Lang would not have gone very far without the finencial backing of reputable organizations/individuals. I´ll never be the one to belittle his contribution in seeing the job through.

HOWEVER, whoever held the title to the aircraft at the time (and remember, it has had some highs and lows in it´s time), decided to donate it to the Brooklands Museum. You can not fault that. The owner decided that the aircraft was more relevant to an English musem than an Australian one. This particular replica did re-fly all the long-distance flights flown by the Vimy, they either started or ended in the UK. I, for one, could not think of a better place for it than the UK (and I´m not even english!!! Just a stupid Icelander).

At the time of the donation of the aircraft to the Brooklands Museum, was Mr. Lang still the owner of the aircraft?

Phantom,
While I have no expert knowledge of the F-100 as such, from what little I´ve read about the early problems of inflight break ups they seem to have been caused by neutral or even negative yaw stability leading to a dutch roll, which at high speed was violent enough to tear the airframe apart.

A short (laymans terms) description of Dutch roll (and no, I´m not an aerodynamist;)). Dutch roll is caused by a yaw upset which will lead to the wing on the outside of the yaw travel “faster” through the air creating more lift than the inside “slower” wing. The aircraft will start to bank to the same side as applied yaw. As the up going wing is now producing more lift than the downgoing wing it will also be producing more induced drag (drag caused by the creation of lift). As the drag on the up going wing increases with the lift, the drag will finally slow that wing down relative to the speed of the aircraft. You could say it was like someone was pulling the wing back yawing the aircraft to the other side and the other wing will start producing more lift banking the aircraft the other way around. This way, you end up in a cycle that gets more and more vicious each time if nothing is done to stop it.

Dutch rolls (yaw – roll coupling) are very pronounced on swept wing aircraft with low yaw stability because once the yaw starts the wing on the out side of the yaw will present a greater wing area to the airflow enabling it to produce lots of more lift for realatively low changes in yaw.

To fix yaw instability install bigger tailfins or strakes.

Hope this made some sense!

I’m more interested in how much lanolin paint was used on BOAC flying boats. 😉

Then you are in for the full half an hour argument:diablo::D:D

To go a bit OT:eek: I seem to remember from my ground school on the Twin Otter, that the PT-6 turbo prop engines will run quite happily on AVGAS and it is certified for use in that engine as a “get me home” last resort. IIRC there was a limitation of 150 hours of running time on AVGAS during the engine live.

Ok, there was a slight thread creap, but not going as far a Germany:D