At least for male travelers, this two minute airline commercial from Russia might just be the best one ever and perhaps not long enough! No word on whether it was effective and actually led to more passengers…
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Wales Online has profiled retired engineer Thomas Merlin Maddock who lives in the same Valleys house on Meadow Street, in Pontycymmer as pit carpenter and would-be aviator pioneer Christopher Carlyon did in 1904. Carlyon is not going to be a familiar name to aviation history buffs, but just months after the Wright brothers took to the air, the 17-year old started building his own flying machine in a shed he built 400 feet up a mountain near Bridgend called Coedcae.
His plan was to build a flying machine to glide across the Garw Valley at its narrowest point of about half a mile. However and after several tests on the slopes below his shed, it and the shed were destroyed by a violent storm in 1910.
Demoralised that his flying machine was destroyed before he could do a full fledged flight, Carlyon never returned to the project. Maddock only learned about the would-be aviator pioneer after his father attended the 59 year old Carlyon’s funeral in 1947.
Today and despite being 78-years old, Maddock, who has spent the last decade researching Carlyon’s plans, is taking up the challenge. He believes that Carlyon was inspired to build his flying machine after reading up on the Wright brothers and studying pictures of their aircraft. He also visited Carlyon’s who lent him a box full of glass slides to build prototypes first with a wingspan of 12 inches, then 24 inches and now eight feet
However, Maddock has no intention of taking the final craft for a test flight over the Garw Valley as he says that Carylon picked the most exposed part of south Wales and could have been killed trying to fly it there. Instead, he has found two pilots willing to fly the aircraft once its built, but it will be towed along on the ground to see if it lifts eight or 10 feet to prove this unsung local aviator pioneer right.
Merlin Maddock in his Pontycymer workshop with the 1/3-size replica of a glider first built by Christopher Carlyon, WalesOnline .
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Don’t have any plans for this coming Sunday? The Welsh Spitfire Museum near Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, Wales, is set to hold its open day starting at 10 am.
Expect to be entertained by the Army, Pembrokeshire’s Air Cadets, classic and vintage cars, bikes and tractors plus an original steam engine. For nostalgic attendees, there will Forties music from Sandy Sparkle and there is no need to bring a packed lunch as there will be a BBQ, and Salad Bar. In addition, a special ale called Welsh Roundel from the Gwaun Valley Brewery that was brewed just for the event will be available. Finally, the whole event will be watched over by the soldiers of the Glamorgan Home Guard.
The Welsh Spitfire Museum’s aim is to restore vintage aircraft and currently they are involved in the restoration of a MK VIII Spitfire that saw little action during the war and ended up in Australia.
The museum is open to visitors from 10 to 4 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Directions:
For the airport, take the A40 towards Fishguard.
The airfield entrance is two miles outside Haverfordwest on the right hand side (East).
[GPS Co-ordinates: 51.830706,-4.96951]
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There was a rather unusual crash landing last Sunday at the Duluth International Airport in Minnesota, but it didn’t involve aircraft. Instead, two bald eagles who were fighting in midair had locked their talons together and could not separate before crashing onto the pavement:
According to Randy Hanzal, a Minnesota conservation officer who took the above pictures, mature eagles will sometimes fight over territories by crashing into each other and grabbing an intruding eagle with their talons. Usually, the eagles will let go before hitting the ground, but in this case, they had their talons so deeply imbedded in together, they could not let go of each other.
Hanzal said the two eagles were remarkably calm. So he loaded both into the back of his truck because he had no container big enough to put them in and covered them with blankets and jackets. However and half way to a rehab center, he heard a ruckus and turned around to see feathers flying and one eagle on the back of his tailgate. That eagle flew away while the other one decided to hang around for some antibiotics, fluids and pain medication as he or she (its apparently hard to tell what sex an eagle is) had one deep abdominal puncture along with other puncture wounds around the legs.
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Last week we mentioned a 20-year old Californian pilot who is attempting to fly around the world, but recently a 21-year-old Malaysian pilot named James Anthony Tan who suffers from dyslexia made a record breaking half-way around the world flight in a single-engine Cessna 210 Eagle aircraft – making him the first Malaysian and the youngest pilot to do so according to Malaysian media accounts.
However, Tan’s achievement as a pilot is extra special because dyslexia makes reading words, numbers and symbols difficult, but dyslexic people are also highly creative, intuitive and excel at three-dimensional problem solving. Tan avoids flying at night but he still holds a pilot’s licence from Australia and UK authorities.
His 20,000 km flight began in Langkawi, Malaysia on March 26 and ended at Teteboro, New Jersey in April with the route taking him to or through Subang, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, Russia and Canada. Upon landing the “The Spirit of Malaysia,” Tan was given a rousing welcome by the Malaysian community in New York and he will return to Kuala Lumpur via Phuket on May 15.
Regarding the flight, Tan commented:
“I had some moments of concern…about adequate fuel, whether I was on the right course, etc. But I was really scared when I flew across Russia to Alaska. The ocean below me was frozen…I even saw frozen waves! What would happen if something went wrong with the plane as I flew this long stretch of airspace. It was scary…”
Tan’s flight was intended to raise awareness about the problems faced by children with special needs and to show that such children can still “chase their own dreams, no matter how impossible they may seem.” He has also already been inducted into Malaysia’s Book of Record for his previous expedition of 13,000 nautical miles from the UK to Bangkok last year.
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If you push the stick forward, the houses get bigger. If you pull the stick back they get smaller (Unless you keep pulling the stick back – then they get bigger again…)
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Twenty year old Californian Jack Wiegand’s quest to become the youngest person to fly around the world solo recently hit a problem: He forgot his passport. Even worst, Jack only noticed not having his passport when he arrived at his first international destination, the remote town of Iqaluit, Canada, located northeast of Hudson Bay.
Luckily, Jack remembered making photo copies of his passport and visa documents the night before his hometown of Fresno, California, and he told his mom to check the copy machine. Luckily for him, it was still face down against the glass.
According to Jack’s blog, his flying adventures began on his 13th birthday when he piloted his first introductory glider and then on his 14th birthday, he became the youngest pilot in the Central California Soaring Club to solo a glider. At aged 16, Jack soloed his first single-engine power plane and now he intends to break the Guinness World Records™ title by becoming the youngest person to fly solo around the world with the trip being paid for by donations which will also benefit two non-profit organizations, Big Brothers Big Sisters and International Agri-center Ag Warriors.
Jack is actually scheduled to arrive in London today and then its on to Rome on Monday with his final arrival back in Fresno scheduled for June 8th.
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Ron Rapp, the blogger behind the House of Rapp, has written a lengthy essay about how he got into aviation as a pilot. The essay is lengthy because Ron’s life took a number of twists and turns where he crossed paths with aviation but did not dive right in. For instance: As a child, Ron’s mother took him on a memorable flight from Los Angeles to Missouri in 1977 to visit grandparents and the trip was made via a “shiny red and white” TWA Boeing 727 with everyone dressed up for the occasion (this was, after all, before “deregulation”). He even got his picture taken in the cockpit with the pilot.
Unfortunately, Ron’s parents passed away at an early age and he moved from Southern California to Alaska to live with relatives – one of whom had been hired by the FAA as a replacement Air Traffic Control Specialist after Reagan fired all the controllers who took part in the PATCO strike. However, it was not visits to FAA control rooms that got Ron into aviation.
What finally got Ron interested in Aviation? This is what he wrote:
It was 1998. I was driving down the street one day on the east side of John Wayne Airport for a reason I cannot recall (except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with aviation), and noticed a series of sky-blue awnings that said ‘Flight Training’.
Sometime between where the awning started and where it ended, I made the decision that yes, I was going to do that.
So he slammed on the breaks, pulled into the parking lot and never looked back. It also helped that Ron just happened to be at a point in his life where he had sufficient quantity of both time and money.
With Ron’s story in mind, we would like to ask our readers a simple or potentially difficult question: How or why did you get started in aviation?
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Flexjet recently partnered with the Jet Art Group to create artworks in celebration of Learjet’s 50th anniversary. However, these were no ordinary artworks as artist Princess Tarinan von Anhalt used the power of Flexjet’s Learjet 45 XR engine instead of a traditional paintbrush.
So-called “jet art” was pioneered by the princess’s late husband some thirty years ago while her latest pieces were created by hurling paint into a force of approximately seven tons (or several times greater than hurricane winds) while standing 50 feet between the aircraft and the canvas. The heat and velocity from the Learjet aircraft’s engine blends and welds the paint onto the canvas to create abstract paintings.
Sounds easy, right? Actually its not because von Anhalt must consider the wind, temperature, heat, the thickness of the paint and exact timing to create her works of jet art. She also set out to paint 101 works over a two day period this time around and its worth noting that such works have been sold to collectors for as much as six figures – enough to at least pay for a few rides on a Learjet or perhaps even buy one!
If you want to learn more about jet art or see more pictures of the princess in action, check out the Jet Art Group’s website here.
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