Warbird Information Exchange

We flew into Orlando around noon time today and appr. was talking to Blue Angel #1. We asked the controller if #7 wanted to to join up with us, A Hawker 700, since the controller was giving them a hard time about having to fly by themselves. They were a flight of four, 30 miles north of us.

Would have been cool to fly with the Blue/Blues.


Cheers,

Lynn

From the 'Pensacola News'

'The National Museum of Naval Aviation was almost unscathed by the storm. Nichols said there were a few leaks in the roof, but the exhibits inside were unharmed.

Some of the historic aircraft parked on the tarmac behind the museum were damaged, however. The canopy of an A-6 was sheared off. A couple of wings lay on the pavement and some planes, evidently blown off their moorings, had collided with other aircraft, causing significant damage.'


Now here's a thought...should these museums {Pensacola, Weeks etc }be relocated away from the Hurricane danger zones.? It seems these storms are only going to get more frequent and more poweful as time goes on with the climate changes. An expensive proposition I know, but perhaps no more expensive than repairing the damage each time and inevitably the loss of some really historic airframes. Thoughts anyone ?

Dave

Couple of problems with this idea:

1. Where is a safe zone? Short of moving everything to New Mexico or Arizona everywhere has an issue. California has earthquakes, mid-west has tornados and hail, north has blizzards. There is virtually no place "safe" to display

2. Fantasy Of Flight is one of the more commercial museums and is situated to take advantage of the tourism industry in the Florida area. I doubt Mr. Weeks would want to move the entire collection to Borrego Springs.

Hurricanes are a fact of life, they happen. These places (especially NMNA) need to get these aircraft under cover. Mr. Weeks does an excellant job of this leaving only a couple of the biggest aircraft exposed.

Unfortunately, as much as we would like too, you can't Nerf the world.

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A much better approach would be to keep all of the aircraft in airworthy condition so they could be flown out of harms way....

Cheers,

Brett

Say what?

Tell you what, guys. I know a place which is great for tourism, has excellent weather, the best food in the world, the people are nice AND THERE ARE NO HURRICANES OR TORNADOES.
So, let's move NMNA, FoF and everyone else to .... SUNNY ITALY!

Gregory
Joking ... up to a point

That should have read more 'powerful' .

Gregory , I was actually thinking New Zealand would be the place....especially at Wanaka [ Kermit often comes down for the show anyway ] , or since we are building a flying museum here at Omaka, Blenheim....
Otherwise, perhaps some sort of underground ' airfield bunker' type complex could be built to offer protection , especially to the outside exhibits.

Dave

well, if you wanted a nice stable climate, good weather almost all year round, low humidity and no hurricanes or tornados or earthquakes then how about Woomera in south australia? about the only real drawbacks are it's isolation and the heat. and if kept airworthy well, so they tour every now and then. I wouldn't mind.

Unfortunately since they are the Navy, most all of their properties are going to be located at or near the coast line anyway. I think there's no doubt the museum is well established and will remain where it is.

I think the lesson for the future would be to build some no-frills hangars to house the vast majority of the outdoor collection. There are NO pluses to leaving historic aircraft exposed outdoors in a salt water climate. For the time & money it's going to cost them to repair the damaged planes, I'm guessing they could alternately have gotten a pretty good head start on housing a lot of their outdoor collection.

Maybe this is an excellent opportunity for the Navy to strategically liquidate some of their redundant stock of Wildcats & Dauntlesses to help secure their collection against future disasters. I think the trade off would come close to equaling out in regard to the guaranteed secure future of all the airframes involved. At least the Navy would know that the airframes they DO retain would be far more secure.

_________________
Rob Mears
'Surviving Corsairs' Historian
robcmears@yahoo.com
http://www.robmears.com

Well, the Pensacola news appears to be good for us. Have there been human casualties? (Sense of proprtion required here).

There is a degree of risk in life, and this sort of thing makes those of us in Britain appreciative of the more extreme cimate risks and problems much of the rest of the world faces.

Having been through an earthquake in Tuscany, and seen some rather impressive bushfires there, and knowing of the glow in the dark aspect of Woomera, I'm not too impressed with my fellow forumites suggestions so far.

As for making them all flyable to get them to safely - I like the idea. Tell you what, you can take the rocket powered a/c and the gliders and the primitive helicopters and...

That said, a serious point about tourism and location, Sir Tim Wallis has proven that if you make it (good enough) they will come. If someone had told me ten years ago one of the world's top 5 Warbird events would occour in NZ, and that it would be a sellout sucess, I'd've told them to get real. If you think about it it is amazing.

Cheers!

_________________
James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

It's a good idea mike but I am going to wait until more information is available before I take collections.

_________________
Scott Rose
Editor-In-Chief/Webmaster
Warbirds Resource Group - Warbird Information Exchange - Warbird Registry

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Hope the members of the Blues are in better spirits today than they were on friday,
We arrived in Nantucket around Noon on friday and the word had just come out of their cancellation and subsequent trip home.
Every member of the Blue Angels Team were able to contact their families by friday night, and everybody was OK from what we heard.
The departure of the team was a sad sight but the explanation of the base commander recalling everyone stationed at pensacola was well posted around the Island.
As we woke up on Sat. morning I looked out the window and the 7 F-18s were taxiing out to the runway one at a time, each receiving their clearance to flight level 260 upon departure (26,000 Ft), except for BA #9, Fat Albert cannot climb like that, and even the Cape Approach controllers were sending their best wishes to the boys as they were handed off down the line

I am not sure which pilots Mother I was talking to this afternoon, but she mentioned her son was going home to a house that was destroyed, his refrigerator was down the street and several neighbors furniture was in the spot where his house used to be, although he did not own the house, all of his stuff was gone

Although the weather at ACK was less than perfect for an airshow, and the star performers had to cancel due to forces beyond anybodys control there was still a good feeling on the airport today


see you next weekend in Nashua K.L.

I think you have woomera ( space launch site ) confused with maralinga, emu and montebello islands ( atomic blast sites ). no night time glows there except in the pub that I saw.