A fun filled weekend

No (hands-on) flying this weekend... instead I went down to Hamilton on the Saturday to watch Trevor do some IFR practice in the Sim. WOW! Talk about being busier than a one armed paper hanger!! I have decided I will just stay a VFR pilot and fly on nice sunny days ;) Seriously tho, I realised just how much more I have to learn... a very interesting experience. I also met a guy who is building a 3/4-scale Mustang, I hope to become very good friends with him ;)

Then on Sunday, I went to the Open Day at the Ohakea Airforce Base.

Flew down on the warbirds DC-3... what a way to travel! An absolutely gorgeous aircraft, smooth as silk (and plenty of legroom!)

After a highspeed pass ('saluting the base commander') we landed and taxied to the apron, before they figured out where the DC-3 was supposed to be parked!

I then spent the day wandering around looking at static displays of aircraft... they had wheeled out an old A4 Skyhawk, a Strikemaster and one of the Aermacchi's)... a Singapore Airforce Hercules... An RAAF F-111... and a few others (Thunder Mustang, Corsair, Kittyhawk's etc.)

They also had some of the airforce trades on display... my favourite (and possibly the highlight of the day, aside from the F-111 aerial display) was the Avionics section. I'm a bit of a geek, and the avionics guys had some really cool stuff, like the flight sim rig using 5x 22" Widescreen Touchscreen display panels! and the night vision demo. However, I happened to be wearing my NZFF T-shirt and this guy says "Flightsimming eh?, have you had a go on the Iroquois simulator?"... "ummmm no"... "would you like to?"... "Hell yeah!"...

So we waited for 5 minutes or so, for an escort to the 'secure' area and had a play on the $750,000 (thats 2nd hand ex-Singapore, they're $1.5million new!!!!) Iroquois simulator! woohoo... nice to get something for my tax dollars! Despite the graphics being a bit crap, the actual hardware is pretty impressive... (there are some pics of it if you follow the 4th link of pics below)

Following that we were treated to an impressive display from the F-111 to finish the day... apparently burning a tonne of fuel (700 litres) per minute when doing the "dump and burn"...

And then a delightful flight home in the DC-3 with a glass of bubbles or two ;)...

You can see lots of pictures from the day (I'm the good looking one flying the helicopter sim in the last lot of pics) here, here, here and here. WARNING: Lots of photo's, so if you're not on broadband it could take a while!