When wars were colder, planes were cooler!

Not you’re talking CFH.

Me hooking up a load at Dungannon.

Sweet baby jesus and the orphans. I see the complete lack of style and taste in the 70s and 80s wasn’t restricted to just music, fashion and buildings…
Some of those look as though they were designed by H J Simpson esq. Or the bloke what designed the new Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Rotary action?

One word gentlemen… Huey.

Sooty, you flew Wessexes? Ever done any SAR at all up at Valley?

I see your Huey and raise you Sea King:

Flew! Hardly, I just filled the things with go juice and connected cr@p to them for onwards move.

And Lynx – my old boss bought one of these second hand, ran it as a pop-stars taxi for a few years until his business partner crashed it:

If you are going to go the rotary route then it starts and finishes with the mighty wokka.

Are you sure about that?

I took a fancy to the MH-53 Pave Low after reading “Clear and Present Danger”. This should partially explain why…

Willard – Whilst they do have a seriously purposeful look about them the bloody pilots (or perhaps flight planners) of the 21st SOS never seemed to understand the difference between Zulu time and local time. Hence those bloody noisy beasts passing over my block at RAF Stafford at silly o’clock in the morning being the notice I get that they’ve arrived early for that refuel I am supposed to be doing in an hour!

I’ve just realised after a bit of Wikipedia trawling that all the really cool helicopters and planes are either being retired, or have been retired from active service already. The Pave Low IV for example, flew its last mission in September last year. The F117 is out of service now and the writing must be on the wall for a lot of other good stuff.

Looking at the new crop of jets, they all seem a bit samey. As though they have lost all the flair and individuality that used to make airshows so much fun.

I guess all armed forces want these days is a nice clean robot to do it all.

Aircraft technology has matured, there is now an accepted (by the majority at least) way of ‘doing things’, hence many aircraft starting to look alike. This of course is helped no end by there being far less individual companies making aircraft these days.

I’m currently workiing on Staffs University campus sootyandjim. I remember seeing the MH-53 very often, having lived most of my life in Stone. Still get a lot of Merlins, Lynx, Chinooks, etc at low level over the campus as they drop in to refuel..

I was quite disappointed to see that Tomcats were retired a year or so ago as well … Top Gun is now officially out of date

AWACS

I remember My dad talking about gun sight pictures of U-2s taken by Lightnings back in the 70’s. It was a pretty useful fighter for it’s time. It would even give a F15 a run for it’s money. He tells a tale of a pretty “sporty” one out in Germany that was well known to be a quick even for a Lightning, it could out accelerate 104’s even low down. Scared the whatsits out of the Germans and Italians.

It was basically two effing great big engines with a bloke strapped to the front and the smallest compliment of missiles it could get away with hanging off it.

Scary fast but scarily short legs.

Taffy Holden knows all about how fast a Ligthning can be, yikes!

And what is was all about, (Vangelis again!).

queen of the skies

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from a tornado on the wing, mont blanc poking its head out through the clouds behind

Aye, that it was. Airframes took a right pounding as well, hence the relatively short service life.

Short legs is right enough (40 seconds full re-heat = no fuel left) crap radar, crap avionics. Is was the epitome of Take off – Shoot – Try to get back.

the epitome of Take off – Shoot – Try to get back.

Nope, that would be the Me-163

Reminds me of the early 80’s when I was assembling and wiring up the weapon control system for the Jaguar. A difficult, but satisfying task.

In the days when we still made things!

sockpuppet – Ah, the Vickers Funbus. The only aircraft I know of with a urinal for three on board.

Bloody noisy all those Conways.

The one that dosnt exist…..

Aurora? Of course it exists…! Only they don’t keep it in Area 51. That would just be daft, as everyone would look for it there.

It’s next door, in Area 53. 😉

CFH – Apparently Area 51 is a ruse, all the real secret stuff happens in the UK.

Tin foil hats to maximum

Let’s go rotary…one for RudeBoy here…

(Sees HIND-D, wets himself…)

Funny, ‘cos as opposed to War, Death and Destruction as I am, I find a strange beauty in Warplanes. I spose it’s maybe some primeval instinct thing; the ultimate weapon.

SR-71s are so mental, that when they’re on the ground, they leak, apparently, as the Titanium plates are made just a tiny fraction too small, and don’t meet up propply. Because when it’s at speed, the friction with the air heats the plates up so much, they expand, and lock together. Having them meet perfectly, whilst stationary, would mean that the plates would buckle at Mach-stupid, and the plane would fail.

I was well into warplanes as a kid. My mum thought it was unhealthy.

Personal faves are the Rockwell B-1, and the Harrier Jump-Jet.

Also like these:

Grumman F-14 Tomcat Terror

McDonnel Douglas F-15 Eagle

SAAB Viggen (Grippen in front; not as nice imo)

Nasty ‘orrible things, the lot of ’em….

I want, need and must have an Ekranoplan.

I think that is a perfectly reasonable demand.

Mattoutandabout. That’s not a Sea King, it’s a Sea commando

sootyandjim, that site is a hoot! one to look over properly later! Tin-foil-tastic!

I believe the Aurora actually lives in Scotland most of the time, with over the north sea being its chosen route to Afghan………

Liking planes as a child is unhealthy?

*stealthily shuffles large pile of “Defence Recognition Journal” from late 80’s/early 90’s into a far less obvious place than on desk at work.*

Mind you, when in the RAF cadets, I was shit hot at NATO and Russion/Warsaw Pact recognition. And airshows were cool. I defy anyone to say they weren’t.

These are real aircraft!! I seem to grow up with many of these, remember the Tornado coming out and now have a look in one, like an old BL Marina, Some of the new stuff is slick (not cool) but they don’t really fly (wouldn’t without major computer input) so not sure they full count either. One of the coolest threads yet but have a feeling only the oldies will appreciate. And if you are into to this lot what about real racing cars!? Lotus 41 etc… and 60s 70s LeMans racers. I think I missed my age? But no mountain bikes either, I reckon most of us would have been out there rallying, trialing etc.. all a bit expensive and silly now. thanks to all who put up those great phots

[troll]

Bzzzzzzzttt!

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Liking planes as a child is unhealthy?

Not so much planes themselves, but warplanes. My mum was a little girl during WW2, and warplanes were not something to be ‘admired’, considering the terrible devastation they can cause. I can see her point.

Therefore, I find my own fascination with them all the more stange. I do try and ‘unimagine’ the war bit, though, and see them more as pieces of engineering technology.

When I was a kid we used to get just about every plane in the NATO inventory buzz our house** (never an SR-71 though… :-(). We were no where near an air base – just on a route to and from their playgrounds I guess. I never got bored of it and I sort of miss it these days…

** Meltham near Holmfirth, Huddersfield.

Same here with the cadets… Every summer I’d get packed off to some RAF station for a week in a thinly disguised attempt at recruiting.

All the same, it was ace. Went to Germany for a week one year (saw lots of Tornados), Somerset (saw lots of radars and comms equipment), Linconshire (saw lots of Tornados, but different versions) and Norfolk (saw bugger all, broke my arm). As a kid, all that tech was fantastic and really did make me want to fly jets. Alas, it was not to be.

I still like them though and envy Larry Ellison’s ability to buy them as toys. Swine

Have we had the Starfighter? Or the Sabre. Both pretty cool. Was at Riat about 10 years ago and a Hind spat bloomin great fireballs of anti HSM flares out ofits side pods. We were in feild under the flight line and the Hind was about 500 ft up . I almost started to run for cover, blazing balls of magnesium raining down at me .
B52?

One taken by me, not very good, but we did touch on choppers.

Oh my God, what a thread! Thank you guys, for keeping it going, and putting up so many cool pics. Living on RAF Lyneham’s flightpath, I’ve seen many aircraft going in and out on ‘circuits and bumps’ and been to quite a few airshows over the years; Farborough, Fairford, Kemble. The Vulcan has to be one of the most spine-tingling planes to see in the air, coming in low and slow in full dirty configuration, wheels and flaps, down, airbrakes open, then everything coming up, nose coming up almost 45 degrees, and full re-heat on. Nothing compares. I saw a Buccaneer come in low and fast on a wet day, at around .9 Mach, with only it’s wingtips nose and tail pod poking out of a compression cloud. I used to regularly see a Vulcan flying around with a big black box under it’s belly containing the test engine for Concorde. On holiday at Llanstephan in Wales I used to watch A10’s on gunnery ranges across the estuary. Amazing noise, like someone ripping corrugated metal. Anyone interested in the high-altitude aircraft should read Skunk Works about Lockeed’s advanced development area and Groom Lake, Area 51, which has been moved into a really remote mountain area. When they developed the SR71 the technology was so new they had to first design tools to work Titanium because no-one had ever touched it before. Fascinating stuff. That radio conversation about decending from 78 to 50-odd thousand feet, makes you wonder if it might not have been Aurora, there have been numerous reports of black ‘triangles’ making smoke-ring exhaust trails, which sounds like some sort of pulse rocket motor. The Yanks almost certainly have a replacement for the Blackbird, as satellites cannot be moved quickly or cheaply enough, after all it was seventeen years before they owned up to the Wobbly Goblin, the F117A.

Who’s posted the mega pic? Why is this thread taking so long to load?

(Switches to Manual Mode)

If you are going to go the rotary route then it starts and finishes with the mighty wokka.

That is quite possibly very true…

This is the ultimate copter

Mi24 hind, beast of a thing

That was until the afgans got hold of some stingers when the ruskies invaded Afaghanistan and blew all of them out of the skies!!!