Brooklands

My recent business-trip to London resulted in some time to spare and visit the Brooklands Air Museum. This great Musum is on the grounds of a former car racetrack and the Vickers Aircraft factory. Almost all Vickers commercial aircraft and other british postwar airliners are displayed outdoors in great shape. This museum is also for the car enthusiast and features a great variety of historic high-class race cars and aiport related vehicles.
Three busy and appointment-packed days, lots of Guinness and a little bit of aviation - on those days I really like my job!

Wednesday night get-away!

It has been some time since I last flew in a Cessna 172. About 10 years ago I flew so may times in such planes with my friend Ingo throughout Germany on weekends, mostly discovering all the airfields in the former GDR - but since then I rarely get to fly in single-engined piston planes.
Today I got my fix again though. I accompanied an IFR training flight for about 2h around Hannover and two rounds at night over the city - with no clouds at all. My pilots were our pleasure flight expert Carsten and our Austrian instructor Andreas (who challenged Carsten a lot during this flight). Great way to end a days work!
An interresting side-note: This was my first flight in our diesel-engined 172, D-EDDV. The Cessna 172 series is the longest built and most successful civil aircraft ever built and in production since the late 1950s. About 50.000 of these reliable planes have been built so far and provided trainig and joy to millions of pilots. Our Cessna 172 (D-EDDV) is a new generation one, bulit 1999).

On the photo of the airport, my office is visible - it is the old barrak buliding to the right and on the small apron three of our aircraft are visible - the Piper Cheyenne, our Citation Encore+ and XLS+.

Visit of an old friend

I don`t know how many hours I spent on bord these beauties (during my time as a volunteer flight-manager at Ostend), but one ting is for sure: These Antonov AN-12s are real "man-airplanes"! Since the EU baned european airlines from flying those, such planes became a rare sight in western Europe.
This one is operated by russian enterprise "Kosmos" and came with some 16 tons of cargo from Athens to Hannover. Katrin and I decided to spend some time at the second of April at the airport, watching it arrive and beeing unloaded.