Airbus A-380 comes to Hannover

Quite a highlight at Hannover airport was the first and most likely the only visit for the next few years of an Airbus A-380. This visit attracted lots of people outside the fence (about 10.000) and also inside the apron-areal.
About 50 years ago my dad had a similar experience when Lufthansa took their - than new - Boeing 707 to Hannover for the first time.

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.

Cruising

What a nice ride! On friday I spontaneuously decided to go for a ride from Hannover to Leipzig. It was a lovley winterafternoon with low sun. I got to spend the entire 35min on the copilots seat. The Piper Cheyenne is one of my most flown Turboprops and also this routing I flew already many times and I must say it never gets boring. My journey back to Hannover by car took a lot longer due to the first snow this year in Germany.

The bottom pic shows my homebase. This is where I grew up, this is where I work and almost live.... Hannover airport.

Yesterday Torben and me visited again the Luftfahrtmuseum Hannover-Laatzen again after a few month. At this place I spent countless hours restoring aircraft engines, helping to put planes together or giving tours.

I somehow miss that - but I am happy that Torben sometimes wants to come here with me to climb into the helicopter and some of the planes.

The aircraft in the picture is a Dornier DO-28 D2 "Skyservant" and one of only three aircraft outside - the rest being well protceted in two hangars.

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.

My ride of the day: Yesterday I managed to fly with Guido (my brother) is this bird - and believe it or not, we managed to fly all the way from Hannover to Bremen nonstop! The entire distance of  90km in 13min. For me it was the first time to fly on a Cessna 525A / Citation Jet 2.

As usual, there are some more pics on my flickr.com site (click the link).

Netter Ausflug mit Guido am Sonntagabend nach Bremen. Für mich eine Typenpremiere - der CJ2 fehlte noch in meiner Sammlung. Die ganzen 90km haben wir nonstop in 13min zurückgelegt mit einem netten Anflug auf den Airport Bremen. Weiter Bilder gibts wie immer auf meiner flickr.com Seite (Link oben rechts).