The owner and founder of Red Bull is the richest person in Austria. He needed that when he bought two surplus Luftwaffe Alpha Jets, rolled them down to Fairchild-Dornier near Munich for refurbishment and had them put on the German civil register! No mean feat!

🙂

@snoopy & arthur: You’re correct of course, thanks for pointing it out.

@rogerS: Sorry to hear about that, wonder what went wrong as I have seen plenty of pictures of aircraft on airliners.net and in http://www.flugzeugforum.de taken by people on Friday with a Spotters Ticket, and they were not just taken out a building.

@doughnut: The FW190 and the Bf109 were never listed as confirmed on the participant’s list, so I didn’t expect them. The owner of the Swiss P-51D and the Morane D3801 had had a clinch with the “authorities” at the Friedrichshafen show about a minimum altitude or distance not being held (not the first time that that has happened to experienced display pilots there) and as a consequence has cancelled all appearences in Germany (this was reported in a German forum). I thought the show was rather dull, certainly not commensurate with the events which it purported to celebrate (100 years of powered flight and Deutsches Museum).

Thanks for the kind remarks. The aircraft are nowadays very rarely displayed anywhere, even in Germany. Best chance to see them is at the biennial ILA-exhibition in Berlin. Unfortunately, ‘ME also has engine problems now. Spotters saw it land recently at its home base trailing white smoke. The collection also comprises a static Bf 108 (marked “D-IOIO”), an unmarked static Bf 109G-2 (Hispano-based) and has an airworthy Messerschmitt M.17 and of course the Me 262 under construction. The two former a/c are often trucked to displays.