When reality meets your dreams
On 08/02/2010, in Flashback, by steve
Admit it, you too have had dreams of one day coming face to face with a famous actress, or one not so famous but with attributes that made you feel weak inside just thinking about them. Think Pamela Anderson in her early Bay Watch episodes… I most certainly had such dreams but I must also confess that I had dreams also about a different kind of beauty, dating back to the days when the sight of bouncing tits was more cause for giggle than excitement.
I was may be ten when a friend of mine surprised me with a book he found in his grandparents’ attic, entitled “Duel in the sky”. It was a wonderful collection of short stories about aviators in WWI plus a few descriptions of more recent events, among them the story of the historic flight of an Air France Lockheed Super Constellation which was carrying back to Europe the signed copies of the peace treaties terminating WWII. That Super Connie almost ended up in the Atlantic Ocean, treaties and all, due to multiple engine problems… The radio operator on the flight was an ex-pat Hungarian and most of the story was recounted as he saw it from behind his crackling boxes. In the end, they landed safely in Dakar… I do not know how many times I read that story but it must have been hundreds. On each re-read, the Connie crept closer and closer to my heart. We were from different times, never to meet or touch, but she was there all the time.
Then the years passed and, with burning face I have to admit, for a time girls occupied my attention more than airplanes did… Not that much more and only for a time, but still…
Eventually I also learned to accept that those dreams about running into Pamela Anderson on the airport commuter bus were just that, dreams. You do not run into the icons of your dreams in real life. And then it happened…
A venerable old lady – the Ilyushin IL-18
On 14/10/2009, in Flashback, by steve
She was born at a time when glasnost and perestroika were still only words in the dictionary. A four-engine, turboprop transport that was noisy inside and out, was difficult to fly and needed an oil-well to keep her in the air. Yet she formed the backbone of East European air transport for more years than most of us care to remember and, above all, she was beautiful. With perfectly circular fuselage, sleek wings and graceful vertical stabilizer, the IL-18, by appearance, was a queen among aircraft.
But where did this lady come from?
A short left turn
On 01/09/2009, in Flashback, by steve
The arrival of Lufthansa’s shiny new Boeing 727 in Budapest was an event in itself. The flight from Frankfurt was almost always on time, the 727 looking like it had come from Boeing’s delivery centre the day before… We learnt early that she could climb and descend like no other jet serving Budapest and as such she was every controller’s best friend.
Photo Rafael Klöpper
Although one did not play favorites with any airline, it was hard to refuse when an LH skipper asked for a particular runway or other small “favor” pilots sometimes requested. After several months of uneventful operation one morning we noticed that the return flight plan was filed to Belgrade rather than Frankfurt. So what gives?
At the cradle of SWIM
SWIM, well the name that is, was born in the early morning on a misty February day in a hotel room in Luxemburg. It was 1998.The abbreviation of System Wide Information Management, SWIM has now become an integral element of both SESAR and NextGen, the air traffic management development projects in Europe and the USA, respectively. Getting here was not easy.
Following the publication of the first issues of the European ATM Operational Concept Document (OCD) and the ATM Strategy for 2000+ it was felt that the wide-ranging and informal discussions that can take place at a workshop would generate valuable additional information to feed subsequent editions of those documents. The workshop took place in February 1998 in Luxemburg.
The air was pregnant with the need to do something about the horribly inefficient manner the sea of information generated by and consumed in air traffic management was being handled.
My AWACS-story
On 10/08/2009, in Flashback, by jozsi
When we, then young air traffic controllers got to the Hungarian ACC to begin our on- the-job training in mid 1975, it was a very strictly restricted area yet shared the building with the Country’s air defence command positions.
Armed forces of the Peoples Republic’s Army had guarded the entrance since the secrecy of a nation’s air defence system was of strategic importance. This secrecy was however made somewhat obvious to the public by the numerous no parking and no camera signs in the surrounding streets indicating that something must be there.
Then suddenly everything altered in 1992.
C-17s on peace mission
On 28/07/2009, in Flashback, by steve
For those of us who worked at Ferihegy Airport in the 60s and 70s, military service was a simplified affair. Just one month of ground-pounder training (as opposed to the two years meted out on the less fortunate) where after we went back to our civilian jobs of, in our case, controlling aircraft. The assumption was that if NATO came invading Lake Balaton and the Great Hungarian Plain, we would be doing the same job, albeit in uniform…
Training for the worst
As controllers, we were of course aware of the location of each military airport in Hungary, those used by the Russians as well as the few nominally under Hungarian control.
The airport of Papa in the South-West was one of the biggest of the military fields and when the flyboys of that place took to the air, civilian air traffic suffered mightily. Those Migs needed a big chunk of real estate to exercise their skills.
For us recurrent training took the form of a one day briefing given by a bored colonel. He did his best trying to explain why and how the Warsaw Pact armies might need to take Austria (he never used the name though, “enemy” countries were given colours) and what foolproof tactics we would be using but he was no fool. Facing that bunch of pilots and air traffic controllers, he could see the general sentiment that said: the Warsaw Pact armies would probably get bogged down at Shopping City Sud just outside Vienna…
Remembering Papa
A news item on TV last night brought back these memories with a vengeance.
Luckily, we never had to test whether the theory about conquering Shopping City Sud was true, even if Hungarian is the second most spoken language after Austria’s native German at SCS to-day.
The airport of Papa still exists and has just embarked on a new renaissance. The Migs are long gone of course… But yesterday, three Boeing C-17s with Hungarian registration, have taken up residence there to support NATO’s peace missions. The Mayor of Papa was very pleased when he was interviewed on television and his smiles went out to the several hundred flying and support personnel of diverse nationalities who are taking up residence in the area.
I do not know whether our bored colonel is still alive… I hope he is. May be he will also stop at Papa to watch a few C-17s take off and land… then drive on to Shopping City Sud for a beer.
