Amazing sight seen this afternoon

Tony,

Fantastic picture and you're right - F15 is a stunning aircraft - you were lucky to see it because UK displays are so rare.  What amazes me is how old it is and yet how modern it still seems, like all great designs it hasn't really dated.  According to expert opinion it seems it has only really been bettered by the latest fighters Typhoon and Raptor, although nobody has yet put the three of them up against each other (to my knowledge.)

I did see one years ago and the thing that astonished me was that it rotated half way down the runway and then went straight into a the vertical and I'd never seen any aircraft transition to that straight off the runway although I know Typhoon can.  Some great footage of F15 here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...&feature=related

Watching this makes me envious because what these guys do for a living makes pretty much anything else look a bit boring by comparison!

Still, if you can't be a fighter pilot  for real there's always pretend so I built one of these for home fun although the intention is to get it working with the spare projector I have lying around:

Doesn't get used as much as it should really because there's always so much else going on!

Jonathan

Blimey!

Ive friends that'd live in that, if they weren't married....    

Well, I am sure if they had it in their home, they wouldn't be for very long! 

(At least finding him to serve the divorce papers would be easy...)

Beautiful skies over East Kirkby yesterday.

And this is the first wing walker I have seen. Now this young lady had balls ....

Beautiful skies over East Kirkby yesterday.

Jonathan

Absolutely unbelievable. 

Unbelievable my wife puts up with me or just plain unbelievable??!

It has to be said that it resides in the so called 'games room' which is also a home office along with an air hockey table - both of which are under permanent threat of eviction by my wife who is the main user of the home office!

Actually it's quite modest by some standards of home cockpit - see here:

http://www.737ng.co.uk/forsale.htm

http://www.bestweb.co.nz/viper/Gallery.htm

I once visited the home of a flight-sim enthusiast while writing an article on flight simulation for T3 magazine.  The guy lived in a 3 bed semi in Hounslow and by day drove catering trucks at Heathrow airport.  We walked upstairs in his semi and he opened the normal bedroom door and I was standing inside a near exact replica of the Boeing 767 flight deck - it was extraordinary and ran on about 7 different PC's using exact replica software of the real B767 systems.  He told me it had cost him approaching £30k and during the build which took a couple of years he used to go on board the real aircraft when loading the catering and chat with the crew and measure the real cockpit dimensions and take photos, so he could go home and make bulkheads and panels etc to scale.  Having built it he organised an annual round the world flight to raise money for charity and used real airline pilots he knew from Virgin, BA, BMI etc to fly the sectors on his home simulator.  The airlines involved used to provide him with fight plans and real crew meals his wife would warm up downstairs in the house oven and serve to them on the 'flight deck'.  They raised thousands for charity doing the worldflight campaigns and flew around the clock for about 3 days visiting a variety of places.

It's amazing what people with passion an achieve and I admired him greatly.

Jonathan

I'm afraid I just don't get the long-haul flight sim world. Really, how interesting can it be to simulate London - Sydney? Hours and hours of pretty much nothing happening except fuel gauges slowly falling, GPS map slowly scrolling and the distance clicking away. Punctuated by coffee.

Cool video of a working B-29

http://vimeo.com/17388627

Wouldn't embed for some reason

Sad story with BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...h-yorkshire-19952395

Looks like XH558 is closing her logbook next year

Will it ever fly again ?

I don't live far from Doncaster so if it has one more flight in it, I'll make sure I'm there to see it off.

Apologies if this rambles a little, as it's late and the whisky has been flowing. (I've been looking at the photos and not reading the posts, so sorry if this is off thread.)

i grew up in Lincolnshire and used to spend a lot of time sitting at the end of the runway at RAF Scampton (and Waddington for other planes) watching and listening to the Vulcans practicing their landings and 'emergency' take offs. The first photo brought back the sight and sounds of that time. A Vulcan pulling a fast take off, with afterburners on, is something to behold.

oh, and a Red arrow pilot used to live a few houses away from me in Scothern (my village) - very cool when you were 14 or so.