sixtiesrelic

Proud's 4 ct gold toe ring?

Looks a bit like the same mob who thought up the Argosy ... "What are we gunna do with all these spares? The bean counters are goin' crazy". "I know. We'll bung em all together in one package and call it a ... "

As usual Pete, you find the interesting ones. Bit scary seeing them land just past the threshold rather than today's 1000 feet in to give a safety buffer on a bit of down draught near the end of the runway.

Pay the money after answering all the silly questions and wait and wait and WAIT. I'm with Student Pilot on this. Government seen to be doing something, created mass employment and has a new industry to interfere with.

I went there and found it interesting. They have a huge photo collection on computer. Lots of obscure stuff there. Finding the door is a bit of an adventure. It's a small one in an alley at the back of the hangar.

Looked pretty spectacular!

You'd have been one of them for sure. I've seen ya drive on two wheels.

Well written and a pleasure to read. There are those who sit importantly in heated cabins with 'glass cockpits' imagining they're Jumbo captains and there are airmen who feel the breeze if they aren't manoeuvering perfectly balanced, smell the earth and hear the song of the wires around them. Things have changed. There were no instructors back in the day of the first minimum aircraft, Skycraft Scout, Drifter ... Thruster. The Scout was as minimum as you could get... Only elevator and rudder and you sat out front with nothing to stop being whacked in the moosh by grasshoppers. The Drifter and Thruster at least had windscreens, three axis controls and better performance. You got in and flew... a couple of feet above the ground so you wouldn't fall down far and on returning, report what you'd learned to your waiting mates and they'd go off and scare themselves. We dived then climbed to clear barbed wire fences with a sink and bounce over the other side and the idea of getting up to maximum allowable height of three hundred feet was pretty pertifying. I think DCA reckoned there'd be lots of crashes in that dangerous operating zone and they could ban minimum aircraft seeing as they'd actually gotten through the screen of negativity and somehow were uninhibitedly, flying free. There was no secondary effects of controls as the Scout's turned into spoilers if you used a bit over half travel of rudder or elevators. You were very gentle using tip of index finger and thumb on the stick. We didn't do stalls as the stall crept out from the wing root as you started raising the nose to stop the sink when you lost a couple of kilometers per hour, say in a turn or the climb over the fence. The whole aim was to keep the thing in the air somehow. Turns usually resulted in a wheel touching the ground as we gradually sank. We didn't have the sails pulled tight enough together at the wing root so the wings were not producing all their proper lift and were producing a bit more drag. Ron Wheeler (The designer who had fought DCA long and hard to get CAO 95 approved) pointed it out to us the last time I was sitting in the Scout and I didn't get to find out how well the thing flew because the carby played up and I never went in another. Two owners I met and flew with at a paddick on the Brisbane River near Toogoolawah, which the SAA later got a hold of and named Watts Bridge had never had a flying lesson (illegal in single seat minimum aircraft) and went off flamboyantly bending bits of aluminium as they collided with fences and the ground. They'd straighten bits of airframe and I was told the crash champion of Queensland actually broke parts of his and had to buy more ally tubing to replace the busted bits. They did things I was astounded at (They hadn't learned 'You can't do that' and somehow pulled them off.) They flew their aircraft on floats out in the bay and had the same experience as the earliest aviators ... no fear and no restrictions. The bloke who owned the one I flew, had never had a flying lesson. Put yourself in his shoes. Remember your first solo? Bit of fear and trepidation, but you'd been instructed and practised flying with an instructor beside you to take over if things got out of hand, but now it was JUST you. Col's first solo was the first time he got the wheels off the ground. He'd done a fair few fast taxis, but was gung-ho and wanting to get it in the air. We told him to gently lift the thing off the ground and then slowly close the throttle so he'd not climb and ease the stick back to keep off the ground till she settled. Col was a bit exuberant with the 'easing the stick back to get airborne'. Leapt about ten feet up, got a hell of a fright and pushed. Kabam and boing. The kabam was harsh, so the tailwheel banged the ground. There was speed and lots of angle of attack so the boing catapulted the thing back up to ten feet altitude. Col was concentrating solely on pitch and yaw wasn't in his concentration equasion. Remember your first flight? You could keep two of the three axis under control, but the third was just a bit too much. When you got the little smirk on your face because you had kept the wings level and pitch pretty constant, did you find there were hills in front of you instead of the water...'How'd that happen?' Now this particular strip (Old Caboolture, a cow paddick with an igloo in it) had trees not too far from the strip edge ... big straight buggers, and there was fallen timber in the long grass so we started fearing the aeroplane was gunna get awful bent and there'd be no more flying for a week or two AND we'd be visitin' Col in hospital rather than fixing the Scout, but Col got his thoughts together and chopped the throttle and turned. The thing fell down in the long grass and missed fallen branches. There was the problem of the looming barbed wire fence at the rapidly approaching end of strip. Col fell out of the seat after undoing the seatbelt and started rolling around on the ground punching it, whooping and looking like he was having an epileptic fit. 'Poor bugger must be winded'... Nope he was exhilarated. He felt all the thrills we had experienced over those ten or so hours of training in one bomb blast. Naturally as more people got in on the act and died, something had to be done and instructors started teaching people about what they were doing, thus making it safer, BUT no one can take the pioneering experience of 'hopefully I won't hurt myself' some of us had.

I have never used ALT with print screen Geoff. Just print screen works for me on my favourite computer ... XP with no connection to the internet, so I don't have automatic changes buggeryng things up.

Been there. Seen, heared and smelt it. Couldn't believe it when I saw it.

Back in the day when aeroplane mad kids wandered around the tarmac outside the maintenence areas of Mascot with the blessing of the DCA security blokes, my cousin and his weird mates who rode bikes for hours to Mascot were sitting against the Qantas hangar wall in the feeble sunlight, trying to stay warm as they watched the takeoffs and landings nearby. The DCA blokes arrived in their yellow ute and said, "Jump on boys, A DC7 is arriving around the other side". They were carted around to witness the monster taxi in. When the props stopped they swarmed out to check her out. The crew, obviously freight gipsys, climbed down the ladder and happilt talked to the wide eyed enthusiasts. One bloke' in a chaffed leather jacket (most of the polished surface had probably worn off in Curtis Jennies) the cap with the ten thousand hour bash in it (from headphones squashing the sides in) was checking under an engine when Bill remarked, "There's sure a lot of oil leaking out of them". The pilot drawled in a deep Southern accent, " Soenn, They're like an ol' haun dawg. If they ain't droolin... they're seeick!" Bill went on to be a total fan of Douglasses and spent oll his money going on the TAA DC-6 on it's last flight down to Tassie and back. Had to keep riding his bike as he'd been squirriling the cash away for a car.

Fun... I used to have that... before the old maiden aunts got control of the country. After reading the bit about what David C has to take with him in his aeroplane to Temora, I wouldn't be game to buy a flying boat. It'd be overloaded with the bookwork and cost a fortune to replace if it got wet. Hell, for my PPL navex in a Chippy, I took a map a little notebook with important stuff like, Moorabbin Tower is channel A on the five crystal wireless set, Melbourne aeradio is channel B and Esssendon is channel C. Them’s were the days. One three hour dual nav, then a solo three hour nav and that was it. Free to go and get lost when you passed your hour or so's PPL flying check in the training area and circuit. The couple of hundred mile range stopped us getting REAL lost.

Hmm. The pilots went on strike in 1989 and caused all the trouble hay! How long did it take to make that Ansett add to get scabs to come and work here when the big fight got going. The airlines knew exactly what they were going to do, well before the day the pilots resigned in August 1989.

Someone should have gotten that chock sized rock off the bottom for him. Not me though. that water would have been painfully cold withall that snow feeding it.

Yeah, I flew into a few ports there and usually it was pretty good. The first and only day I landed in Wellington was calm with clear skies. Tyhe blokes I was flying with said, "Enjoy... this is the one day a year con ditions are like this."