New addition [an H-60] to my Navy CWU-36/P NOMEX flight jacket thanks to OF member and fellow Navy rotorhead @ChuckMK23 . I was a big fan of Scooby-Doo in the late 1960s/early 1970s…AND I flew SH-60B Seahawks on active duty in the late 1980s/early 1990s…so this is freaking amazing! Thanks, Chuck!

 

Wimbledon approaches...

 

My son's first solo this morning (finally!). He's spending the summer in Grand Forks, hoping to complete his PPL before the end of next month.

 

Woohoo! Congratulations to all!

 

UND is a great program. I have several friends that went there and their airmanship is impressive without the cocky attitude of the other big flight school in Florida...

Many congratulations to your son!

 

How wonderful. Congratulations!
It's a great feeling to finally go solo. I still remember mine. I was an Air Force cadet at the time and my fellow students were waiting with buckets of water on the ground, to give me a drenching as soon as I got out of the cockpit.
Best regards to your son for the remainder of his flight training.

 

Take note of the flight times from L.A. to D.C. and from New York to London. Don't you wish all airliners were that fast?

Source: Habubrats via Facebook

 

The heli-camper….. a new one on me. Sounds a bit crazy but then again it would be rather cool. Not sure I would like to leave it in the wilds for too long without some maintenance checks…. Really good video on the topic / well researched and presented.
.

.
.

 

Great video. Thanks for sharing.
I must admit, I do like the idea of one of these equipped with pontoons. It would be the coolest houseboat for weekend fishing trips. Sadly I don't have a spare $1.5mil lying around

 

I heard an unusual engine noise this afternoon (with Duxford, Mildenhall and Lakenheath nearby I'm used to quite a variety of sounds), went outside and got a quick glimpse of a DH Vampire or Venom passing nearby at about 2000ft. A look at FR24 revealed nothing, but it was heading in the direction of North Weald.

 

I'm guessing that particular aircraft didn't have its transponder on if it didn't show up on a flight tracking app.

 

What are the odds that a teenage tear away could learn to fly by reading a magazine, escape from reform school/prison, steal a light aircraft (at night) and make it to France from the UK in a series of hops (stopping for directions and toilet breaks). I came across an amazing story this week / strikes me as nearly impossible that someone could do this. … but is appears they did.

 

I would guess a Vampire based on what was on the ramp last time I went to Duxford (flight photo is not mine)

 

I hate to admit my age , but Vampires and Venoms were the first aircraft I worked on when I left aircraft engineering training section.

They both had a unique engine noise unlike other jets at the time.
The other one I remember distinctly was the RAF Hawker Hunter which were still in operation in the late 1970s in Singapore (maybe with the RSAF).

 

An old photo in my collection taken in the early 1990s at a museum in Singapore. This Hunter could have been one of those you worked on

 

Never actually worked on Hunters, only saw them when I was on deployments to RSAF Base Tengah.

 

Couple cool ones

 

Ohhhh matron, look at the size of those "Sabrinas"! I see no Sidewinder hard-points so I suppose this is an F.4.

When Marshalls in Cambridge had a big 100th celebration airshow in 2009 I had an airfield ticket and the "blue-note" of a Hunter at low level was one of the highlights. Do people complain about aircraft noise? Not in Cambridge, people lined the streets around because the view was close enough even if they didn't have a ticket -- tickets were not on sale, you needed to know someone who knew someone or was directly involved

 

It does look like a Hunter F.4. But what it's doing in Singapore is a bit of a mystery. I did a bit of research and found that the variant used by the RSAF was the FGA74. This was basically an export version of the FGA9. It was later upgraded so that it was capable of using the Sidewinder AAM.

Image: Hawker Hunter of No. 140 Sqn, RSAF.

Aircraft noise? I call it "The Sound of Freedom"