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.

Ana Bolika

Nice one! This is the only AN-28 in western Europe. She belongs to MD Skydive / Mitteldeutsches Fallschirmzentrum and usually lives at the Magdeburg airfield since late 2007. Her name is ANA BOLIKA. I flew in this colourful bird from Cochstedt, about 20 km to the south of Magdeburg on a paradrop mission. Along with 20 skydivers and birdmen we departed and climed up to 4400m. I was supplied with a parachute for myself but was told not to use it "unless the pilots are running past you".
Waht a great flight on a near cloudless noon in the wild east. Slowly my list of the Antonov aircraft I have flown in is becomming more and more complete. Actually it was planned to use an Antonov 72 jet aircraft for this boogie, but unfortunately legal issues kept it at home in Moldova.
Thanks again to Olaf for several useful infos that day!

Männer-Tag!

With Torben - seen here at the controls of an Antonov AN-2 (or whats left of it) - my Dad and my brother Guido we drove to Wunstorf about 40km to the west of Hannover. In the "JU-52 Halle" Museum the star is an original Junkers JU-52 which was raised from a lake in northern Norway about 20 years ago and restored to pristine contition. The plane landed on the "Hartvikvann"-lake in the early fourties and as most of the others sunk in the following summer when the ice melted.

Over the years a nice little museum developed around this centerpiece with various planes and helicopters and this cockpit section which Torben is about to inspect in detail.  

Antonov AN-2 D-FWJC

My ride for the last weekend. I just love it - this is an Antonov AN-2, one of my favorite planes. I have flown so many times on this particular one, I can even fly it myself. On friday, 02MAY08 we flew from the former russian airforce base FINOW/Eberswalde (about 60km north of Berlin) to Hannover and on Sunday we returned from Hannover via the historic Berlin airport Tempelhof. This airport is one of the airports used in the Berlin Airlift (1948/49) sixty years ago and is one of the oldest airports existing in the world. Unfortunately it will be closed due to supidity later this year which is very sad. I was lucky enough to fly there most likely for the last time in style.

As always there will be more pics at my flickr.com page. Enjoy.

Help us!

These two tired looking AN-2 are sitting at Lesce/Bled Airfiel in the northern Part of Slovenia. They do not seem to be active for some time. Quite scenic location.

Diese beiden AN-2 sehen eher inaktiv aus. Immerhin nicht komplett vergammelt wie viele ihrer Brüder und Schwestern in einigen anderen Ländern. Zu hause sind die beiden in Lesce/Bled im Norden von Slovenien