Golf Hotel Whiskey: for pilots and aviation enthusiasts
Irv Lee is well-known thanks to his popular seminars and contributions to different flying magazines. He is an instructor at Popham and his experience shows in this DVD for rusty VFR pilots.
Rust Remover for Pilots is ideal for infrequent pilots emerging from winter hibernation. It contains lots of gentle reminders towards best practice and some great tips. [Read more…] about Rust Remover for Pilots
Flying in an ex-military fighter jet is every propeller-head’s dream. Blasting through the air close to the speed of sound, climbing up above the airliners, seeing the curvature of the Earth or performing aerobatics and formation flying like the Red Arrows is the ultimate extreme sport. Call it the perfect boy’s toy; a jet like this is much more accessible than you think.
Meet the weekend top guns. Mike Garfield is director of MCS Arabia; a company that helps people do business in the Middle East. A self-confessed victim of ‘compulsive flying disorder,’ he also runs a syndicate that owns two Jet Provosts, based at North Weald airfield, Essex. In RAF service until the early nineties, the Jet Provost is a high-performance trainer which can fly up to 400mph. “It’s very demanding to fly; intellectually and physically. It takes your flying skills to the next level.” He describes formation flying with the group’s ex-RAF instructors: “You could fly your entire life as a private pilot and never see anything like this.”
Buying a new Jet Provost might cost £50,000 or more, joining a syndicate brings the capital cost down to just £4,000. There is a monthly overhead contribution of £120 and it costs around £350 an hour to fly, including fuel. This is roughly three times the price of the sort of training aircraft used to teach beginners at flying schools. In other words, it’s like finding that a Ferrari costs three times as much as a driving school’s Ford Fiesta: surprisingly cheap. To get started, you’ll need a private pilot’s licence and around 100 hours of basic flying experience. There is an RAF-style syllabus and it’ll take 10-20 hours with an instructor before you can go solo on the jet.
The next step for the budding Tom Cruise is the Hawker Hunter. This was a frontline fighter in the 1960s and there are still several dozen in private hands worldwide. One belongs to a syndicate run by Barry Prescott. G-BXFI, or Fox One to its pilots, is a rare two-seater version which means that instructor and pilot sit next to one another. “I live and breathe aeroplanes. I’ve had a passion for flying ever since I can remember. I saw Neville Duke test-flying Hunters at Dunsfold in 1953 when I was thirteen,” says Prescott who founded Avialec, a distributor of aviation components.
The Hunter is a much more expensive plane to own and fly. A share in the Fox One syndicate is £25,000 and it costs around £1,000 an hour to fly. But “try to imagine anything else that can do 575 mph, go up to 40,000 feet and come downhill faster than the speed of sound,” says Prescott. However, it is not a thrill to be taken lightly. The training is rigorous. As with Garfield’s syndicate, the instructors are hugely experienced ex-RAF types with thousands of hours on fast jets, including former Red Arrows pilots. “The secret of flying these jets is that you are under the control of true top guns. I’ve trained with the best pilots in the world,” explains Prescott.
Not everyone wants to learn to fly. Some people just want a one-off fast jet experience. However, both syndicates operate on a special dispensation from the Civil Aviation Authority which doesn’t allow commercial flights. Prescott is hoping to persuade the CAA to change the rules as a way to help finance the increasingly expensive maintenance of his classic aircraft. “There’s a stack of people who would be desperately love to fly it but it will end up in another country if we don’t get permission from the CAA.”
However, outside the UK there are no such scruples. Thunder City in Cape Town, South Africa has Hunters, Buccaneers and the supersonic Lightning available for experience flights. Prices start at €3,500 for an hour in the Hunter and go up to €9,500 for 40 minutes in the awesome Lightning. In a mix of Russian technology and good old American capitalism; Incredible Adventures sell trips on the very latest Russian fighters from Zhukovsky Air Base, near Moscow. Fly up to 80,000 feet and see the curvature of the Earth. Now there’s something for the Christmas wish list.
A version of this article originally appeared in After Hours in 2005.
Project Orion asks you to imagine a world where Apollo was consigned to history’s trash can before it left the drawing board. It is the story of a team of accomplished nuclear scientists, including the author’s father Freeman Dyson, who designed a spaceship powered by nuclear bombs. Starting in 1957, they planned missions to Mars by 1965 and to Saturn by 1970, not in capsules but in 4000 ton space-cruisers, complete with a traditional two ton barber’s chair. It was a serious, if extravagantly imaginative, plan for space exploration on a grand scale. [Read more…] about Project Orion
On May 6, 2003, Polly Vacher took off from Birmingham airport seeking to become the first pilot to complete a solo flight around the world via both Poles in a single-engine aircraft. Despite having only a few years of flying experience, Polly, a 59-year-old mother of three, had already completed a lateral solo circumnavigation of the world in 2001 for the charity Flying Scholarships for the Disabled; this second challenge, for the same charity, would make that achievement look like a casual jaunt. There would be no margin for error. Her voyage to the ice was a 35,000-mile adventure in her Piper Dakota that would take her to at least 30 different countries on every single continent. She had prepared meticulously for two years, was fully insured and had all the requisite permits and visas. [Read more…] about Wings Around the World, Polly Vacher
As a kid, Matt Wietlispach built airplanes and spaceships. Big ones with blankets for fuselages and kitchenware for the cockpit. Growing up hasn’t stopped him. In his basement lurks a hand-built, fully functioning, military flight simulator.
In a thirty-hour-a-week quest for the ultimate simulated experience, every gauge, dial, switch and light in his cockpit is fully operational. He’s got a head-up display, a g-suit, an oxygen system, even a military-surplus ejection seat. Microsoft’s Flight Simulator is at the heart of the system; but coders at Redmond wouldn’t recognize it because of Wietlispach’s extensive customization. It requires five networked computers and an industrial power supply, but there is one concession to comfort: a retractable cup holder.
In the real world he is an avionics engineer for a major manufacturer, where he works on integrating cockpit systems for military aircraft. “It’s close to what I do in the basement but on a different scale.”
He is unusual in the sim-builder community because he prefers old-fashioned electro-mechanical instruments to LCD displays. This increases his workload dramatically: “all the interfaces have to be built from scratch and there are hundreds and hundreds of wires. It just takes forever,” he says with the zeal of a purist.
He’s been working on it for five years and there’s no end in sight. “What takes so long is that I keep changing it,” as he finds new, more intricate components on the internet or in the junk shop at work. The latest development is hidden cameras focused on the pilot and the instrument panel to record test flights. Just like they do at work.
“I never thought I would get as far with it as I did. And neither did my wife,” who calls herself a sim-widow, “I must have spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars on it. I’d probably freak out if I knew exactly how much.” It is his craftsman’s appreciation of the engineering in these precision devices that has seduced him. “I think I must have been a watch-maker in a previous life.”
For some people a Boeing Business Jet is the ultimate status symbol, for others it is a business tool but for a few it is nothing less than a second home. Boeing realised that wealthy individuals and corporate CEOs who spend months each year travelling could use the space offered by the BBJ, a converted 737 airliner, to create a flying home-away-from-home.