A Trip To Museums And Aerodromes With Surprises Galore.

[sixtiesrelic]

The footage is taken.

 

It seems my computer maybe slow or I've gotten more impatient as I've made more movies.

 

Over the last two days off, I have spent about one hour of computer time per minute of finished movie.

 

Every time I make an input, I wait about twenty five seconds to see if I got it right. Been yelling at the computer again.

 

I complecate things by oodles of special effects like bunging music in and adjusting the clip lengths to fit the music if it isn't too hard.

 

I'm getting the idea that the more messing about I do with the project the longer things take as the computer has to remember the whole project not only the last change. Maybe I need to make them in five minute lots and tack them together at the end.

 

 

[Coop]

I'm trying to do too much at the moment Sixties, and reading your fascinating stuff is keeping me up late!! The Navigator and I have over-nighted at Luskintyre in that magnificent establishment when gallivanting around the countryside in our Auster. Like you, I could have stayed much, much longer, but at that time holidays were limited in length.

 

Had a tour of the HARS Cat a few years back before they had done much work on it. I was struck by its size- much bigger than it looks in pictures. The flight at Wanaka was magnificent and is highly recommended- it also included a touch-and-go on the lake, and we were able to move around the aircraft investigating the view from all of the different angles during the flight.

 

If I get time I'll drag up a few images of the Wanaka flight and put them here. Sort of a very late Trip Report....

 

An hour per minute of finished movie is pretty damn good, actually. They talk in ratios of 100's to one in the big movie studios.

 

Better go to bed now or I'll be more useless than usual in the morning...

 

Coop

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

Have you ever had a great idea and run with it during the preparing, but when you are about to carry it out, get the doubts.

 

I had heard that an interesting old aeroplane that had been at Port Macquarie for years, was somewhere in Sydney.

 

I’d visited Port many times in the seventies and eighties, but never seen that old ex- New Guinea veteran. They reckon it was a ripper, floating along with a funny little Popjoy round engine emitting it’s singular sound.

 

I have movies with a few seconds of that aeroplane in the highlands in 1941. I thought the present day owner might be interested in seeing that footage.

 

On the Wednesday, while in Melbourne, I got on the net and found the owner’s name and address.

 

I discovered I was going to pass very near his home on my way from the HARS museum to my next stop at Luskintyre… ‘The home of the Tiger Moth’ I reckoned I could drop off a copy rather than post it, so I found his phone number.

 

I rang… no answer.

 

I’d try again that night.

 

As evening approached I got a dose of the doubts. Would this bloke like some stranger ringing him to say he was going to pass within half a kilometre of his home and would he like the uninvited stranger to bowl up and give him a DVD.

 

I decided I’d give it a go.

 

One of those marvellous, musical, lilting Irish accents, answered the phone. He said ‘Yes he owned the Klemm Swallow’.

 

I told him my name and that I had pre-war footage of the Swallow when it was a Catholic mission aircraft, and he might be interested in.

 

He asked me my name and then said, “I’ve been looking for you. I’ve seen the stills of it you put on the net and wanted to see the movie.”

 

We got on like a house on fire and he hit me with the information that he owned a Compter Swift that Doug Muir had owned. I’ve written a story about Doug here in another thread.

 

It all came to me then, who Roy was. Doug had shown me a DVD that Roy had sent him of the Swift flying at a small strip on the Hawksbury.

 

Roy asked me what I was doing and I told him of my museum crawl and I’d be passing his place on Friday afternoon.

 

He said he was going to Port to pick up some engine parts and would be at Bankstown at around four, would I like to meet him there and I could look at his aeroplanes he had in a hangar.

 

That fitted in my time table. I'd be leaving HARS by two PM so I said yes.

 

One of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

 

I told the receptionist in the hangar, Roy was expecting me and she called him.

 

I was met by a tall, greying haired teddy bear of a man who immediately treated me like we were old friends.

 

We entered the hangar and Roy mentioned that the silver Rapide that took up much of the hangar was his as was the yellow Klemm Eagle beside it.

 

I was flabbergasted. This bloke had four rare aeroplanes. He doesn’t OWN them he told me … he’s just their custodian before the next bloke to come along and look after them one day.

 

The Eagle was an old friend. I’d followed its being rebuilt and then flying in the seventies.

 

It’s a one off… One of the first leisure aeroplanes to have a retractable under carriage.

 

It has a complicated wing folding mechanism too that has you doing a double take when you see part of the wing poking up in an impossible position.

 

Roy showed me the Compter Swift and Swallow which had been de-bagged and some repairing was in progress after they’d been damaged in a container en-route to Oshkosh.

 

He pointed out a message inside the Compter that Doug had written to his son Craig when he had repaired her in the eighties.

 

Doug thought he would own the aeroplane one day and sometime repair it and find the message.

 

 

It was so typical of Doug’s gentle generous nature.

 

I had a sit in the Rapide and Eagle and had their funny idiosyncrasies explained to me.

 

 

The darkness and somewhat cramped conditions in the hangar made photos a bit hard to take. The eagle has both doors open and all the way forward and the cowl is open.

 

The gear retraction of the Eagle is complicated. A substantial foot pedal is connected to the up-lock to release it via a cable, then thirteen turns of a handle winds it down. Over the other side of the cockpit is an indicator that moves into view when the gear is down and locked.

 

 

The Anson’s gear was wound up and down as well and I remembered an old instructor telling me of his time in New Guinea, flying them and the trouble many natives had in applying rotary motion when asked to wind the handle while he flew. They were ok with reciprocal movement but they jerked wildly at the handle when trying to wind it around.

 

The Eagle was designed when aerodromes were ‘all over fields’ and you landed into wind. No one thought the Eagle needed the gear actually locked down as they relied on over centre linkage for that.

 

These days in a stiff crosswind, you can come a gutser if you touch down with the ‘windward wing low and get some drift into wind as the strength diminishes close to the ground.

 

One gear leg retracting doesn’t do the prop, crankshaft and wing a whole lot of good.

 

 

You can see the wing locking pins and handle here and the silver cone pointing upwards is ppart of the wing.

 

The cockpit is entered through doors that are really big windows that open all the way forward like those funny 1930’s cars that gangsters drove. You’d never get to fall out if it opened in flight.

 

It was designed in the days of joysticks. This one looks like a fighter’s one with a hand grip on the top.

 

 

Trim wheel compass rudder pedals and stick over to the right.

 

There was plenty of room in the cockpit because it is a single front seat aeroplane like the Leopard and Hornet Moths. I think the Puss moth was like it too.

 

 

The dash is polished timber with beautifully finished curved timber panelling in front of you. The instruments… vintage with the tacho leaning about thirty degrees to the left like the Tiger Moth’s.

 

 

The throttle and mixture knobs are unusual.

 

In all you knew you were one of the chosen few when you went up in an Eagle back in the day and would feel it now because it feels more substantial than aluminium and light weight plastic of modern aircraft.

 

As we talked Roy asked me where I was staying the night.

 

I had looked up the net and found a cheap pub not too far from Luskintyre and would drive there.

 

He said, “Stay at our place, it is the Friday of a long weekend and accommodation will be more expensive then tomorrow we can go up to my strip which is on the way to Luskintyre and you can see my other aeroplanes.

 

 

[siznaudin]

Wonderful account: you're a lucky man, Sixties...

 

Here's -UTI at Cowra, for the AAAA fly-in.

 

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[sixtiesrelic]

We drove from Bankstown through the Friday afternoon traffic to his place out on the northern outskirts. I was surprised at the ordinariness of the traffic, not like our way on that sort of night. We’d be crawling.

 

 

There was lots of aeroplane talk (and old movie viewing) before, during and after dinner.

 

There is a painting on the wall in Roy’s house of the Compter Swift. It’s a beauty. We are lucky to have artists like Ay Ess and Leonie who have the talent to paint a photographic picture… none of your “As I see it I suspect people who can’t paint use to con some.

 

 

Roy’s wife doesn’t get jealous of his interest in aviation and backs him up on it. I don’t think she has a license, but with Roy information comes out slowly and I didn’t ask.

 

I discovered that Roy has a couple of more very rare aeroplanes at the strip. The one that thrilled me to get to look at was his Fox Moth.

 

I’ve wanted to examine one of them for years. My father flew them and I have looked

 

forward to seeing what it was like being the captain of a great big four passenger cabin plane with the pilot sitting up outside behind them. They had a tiny window in front of the pilot’s knees so he could look in and watch the passengers chucking or screaming. There was a gap where notes could be passed through… Much more admirable than having an annoying passenger yacking in your ear, wanting to know where you are and how long etc.

 

We went to bed late after an entertaining dinner with their daughter who was all happy, having just picked up and driven a new car home in the dark.

 

Next morning after breakfast, we drove to Wiseman’s Ferry and onto the airstrip.

 

On the way Roy stopped and walked back to me and announced he’d just had a phone call from the blokes from Luskintyre and they were flying down to Roy’s soon for a visit.

 

You beauty… plenty of footage of Tiger Moths flying in and out.

 

 

The airstrip has the Hunter passing by it on two sides and hangar on the bank where a friend kept a float plane.

 

The home Roy and his family will live in, is on the top of the old riverbank, way above flood level and has a panoramic view of the river, strip and the downwind legs, so you can see who’s dropping in for a visit.

 

There is a great big hangar capable of housing four aeroplanes comfortably near the house.

 

A Tiger Moth and Stearman are parked with plenty of room around them and at the back of the hangar is stored the Short Scion bare frame and uncovered wings which are in the throes of being rebuilt.

 

The Scion is an aeroplane that on first view generates a thought of, “Wouldn’t wanna go up in THAT”.

 

Short seems to have built an awful lot of ugly aeroplanes. Huge, tall, chunky are descriptions that come to mind. Box shaped seems to have been popular. They even brought it back for the Skyvan.

 

 

The Scion isn’t the prettiest plane around Depends a lot on what engines are on the wings I find, but then when you put it beside some of its contemporaries that had ladders up the side and engines everywhere, it’s not so bad.

 

Two ninety HP engines for six to seven POB makes single engine work sound pretty much like an inevitable descent rate the only path they’d take. I’d compare it with say an Apache with four or five POB, which wasn’t too bright on one, one hundred and fifty HP engine either.

 

Admittedly they are totally different aeroplanes, the Scion being a short field, short hop craft, compared to the Piper’s being a longer range faster machine, but we do tend to compare something with something else we know.

 

 

Near the hangar front doors are four frames with elderly engines stored on them. Two Popjoys and two Gipsys.

 

Against the side wall sits the Fox Moth airframe complete and painted in Royal Flying Doctor of Western Australia pale and dark blue.

 

 

I looked in the cabin and saw that it is modified from the descriptions I’ve seen. The rear seat that is forward facing is a single, while the rear facing, front seats are the simple, bench type. I believe they were canvas strips hung from two horizontal cross members, one at neck level and the other behind your knees, way back.

 

Sadly there’s no little window for the pilot to see down in the cabin.

 

 

The cockpit was a wonder. You have to really climb up to it and there are no hatches like the Tiger Moth. You climb down into a pipe to get onto the pilot’s seat.

 

The cockpit is Tiger Moth, so promotion from a Gipsy Moth to Fox wouldn’t have been a big deal. Nothing new there, except eye height when landing.

 

It felt quite well-like sitting down in the compact space looking at the view my father had over seventy years ago when he was a junior pilot with Guinea Airways. Your eyes are level with the top of the cockpit sides and when you look forward along the nose the bottom half of your vision is airframe. No horizon in front of you when climbing… just out along the sides.

 

Only two aeroplanes came over from Luskintyre for a quick visit. I was introduced to Old Frank and he asked me where I was staying that night.

 

I told him about the pub nearby and he said, “Stay in the house on our field, there’s plenty of room.”

 

I said, “OK then!” which was another great decision.

 

 

[Alan Spears]

Wow...good travelog, Sixties,but,I'm impressed with the painting. Any idea who painted it? Also,I think with all your contacts and enormous aviation knowledge,you could do guided tours for aviators. You know we all tag along with you for a few weeks visiting all the haunts you know of.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

You'll be OK A.

 

You're friendly.

 

All ya do is turn up and start talking AND if they find out about your skill they'll be taking you up for a ride and you'll become a speed painter like Rolf Harris.

 

PS I'm writing to Roy so, I'll ask him.

 

 

[siznaudin]

Hoo BOY! I bet Frank is the Frank who took us up in his Tiger quite some years ago - our first visit to Luskintyre and it was after meeting the Luskintigers at the AAAA fly-in at Cowra and being invited to "...drop in, since you're travelling to Sydney".

 

Loops, barrel rolls ... what an introduction that was! Simply unforgettable. They're a great bunch of very friendly folk there.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

He'd be the same Frank. Still friendly and on the home straight with the finishing of a Breezy.

 

Now that will be flying. Sitting up at the end of a rail with nothing in front of you but a steering wheel... a full round one. A couple of instruments below your knee and the rest on the floor under perspex... engine behind you and Cub wings above and behind you. I'm going back to film that flying machine in the air for sure.

 

I have to talk to Frank or someone to get a few facts right before adding the Luskintyre adventure to tend this story.