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.

Torben Time

What a nice way to spend some time with my little man! I flew over to Seattle for Torbens birthday and some "man-time". We visited the General Aviation Fly-In at Everett and drover over the Cascades to eastern Washington to spend some days around (and in) Lake Chelan.
Beautiful landscape, Aviation and at first a lot of time with Torben - what more could I ask for?

A real litte holiday for the both of us and lots of fun. I so much enjoyed driving around, seeing stuff and playing by the lake and I believe so did Torben. Can't wait to visit him again. I love you Torben!!

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.

Eindhoven, Netherlands

On Sunday i took the chance and flew with the newest addition to our fleet from Hannover to Eindhoven and back. D-IDAX, a Cessna 425 "Conquest I" provided a smooth ride over a solid overcast along the way. Sometimes my job isn't that bad :-)

Being a Freight-Dog again

Sometimes I miss doing the dirty cargo-flights. It sounds strange, but since I am working for an airline, I rarly have any time to hop on a plane and acompany flights. This does not make it easier to reach my goal: having completed 1.000 flights by my 40th birthday. Last thursday though I sold a cargo flight to a customer, departing from our homebase Hannover exactly at the end of my work - so so need to think twice. I ordered our maintanance department to remove the passenger-seats from one of our Piper Cheyennes except for two and after a long time I joined our flight crew on their way from Dortmund to Liverpool - both airports being firsts for myself, at least to visit them by air. Everything went very smooth and we had minimum ground-time on both airports.
An interresting sight was an obviously crashed Cessna 411 at Dortmund which must have been at its last resting-place for many years. We departed Dortmund into the cloudless and star-clear night and only experienced some clouds and rain near our destination Liverpool.
What a great get-away.