Airplane of the Day - Chengdu F-7A

Albanian Air Force Chengdu F-7A

Albania during the Cold War was nuts. Enver Hoxha was the leader (I thought it was Tito, but that was Yugoslavia). During the 1970's they acquired a bunch of MiG copies from China (Russia wasn't Communist enough for them). view from the porch has the story.

The Chengdu J-7 is a Chinese copy of the Soviet MiG-21. 

The Problem with Communism

Beach front bunker in Albania

or any kind of dictatorship is when you get a very stupid and/or crazy man at the top of the heap and the entire country invests huge amounts of time and energy in projects that have no material benefit, like covering the entire country with bunkers, like they did in Albania.

Via Posthip Scott.

Escape From East Germany

After WW2, the West was subsidizing West Germany and West Berlin, while the Soviet Union was extracting reparations. At least they were trying to. It was kind of like trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. Consequently the standard of living was plummeting in the East and people were fleeing in droves to the West, which didn't sit well with their new overlords and so the Berlin Wall was built to stop this white flight. People still kept trying to emigrate. Some of them succeeded. Some of them didn't. Failure usually meant prison or death. Here are some clever guys who made it. The linked stories make some interesting reading.


I hired Ivo to do some plumbing work on my house. He escaped from the Czechoslovakia with his girlfriend in 1986. They were both from the same small town. They went on vacation to Albania (now Slovenia), at the North end of the Adriatic, right next to Italy. They took their papers and cash, put them in a waterproof container, and swam across the bay to Trieste. It took them two years to get to the United States. Ivo's younger brother was opposed to him leaving, but his older sister was very in much in favor of it.

Zdenek Pohl and Robert Ospald

These two hippies built a couple of chairs to hang from the neutral wires on high tension towers. They climbed a 180 foot tower in the middle of the night and pulled themselves, hand over hand, across the border. Took them five hours to travel 300 yards.

Bernd Boettger's and his Diver Propulsion Vehicle (DPV)

Bernd Boettger tried swimming across the border via the Baltic sea, but was caught and spent a year in jail. For his next attempt he built a gasoline powered tractor to tow him. Took him 15 miles when he was picked up by a Danish lightship.

Here are a couple who didn't.

Daniela Walther with her grandparents

 Daniela's father tried to walk his family across the border on August 13, 1961, the same day construction started on the wall. Her mother's nerve failed her and they were caught. Her father spent eight years in jail. Daniela was sent to live with her grandparents. Her family eventually got to West Germany when they were ransomed.

Dr. Gerhard Wagner, Kaiserslautern, designed and built this aircraft to enable his family of five to escape from East to West Germany in 1981. It was never flown. The family were arrested the day before their planned escape and imprisoned for one year. They were then deported to the Federal Republic of Germany, i.e. West Germany. Wait a minute, he's sent to prison for trying to go, and when he gets out he's sent there? He may have been ransomed by West Germany.  Photo by Cplakidas. The airplane is at Deutsches Museum.

Sazan Island

The Brits are running some kind of military exercise on Sazan Island  I had never heard of it, so I had to look it up. I was surprised to find that it is not in the British Isles, but on the coast of Albania. It is outside the city of Vlore and just across the Strait of Otranto from the boot heel of Italy.  It's not very big, only two square miles in area, but its position has made it important to the military since forever. Not much to see, but I did find this picture by iglipustina. What I don't understand is how he got a picture that is half underwater without getting any water droplets on the top half of the image. Good trick, that.
   I also found a page of Albanian mountain scenes that are pretty amazing. Fairy tales got nothing on this place.

Secret Underground Airbases

I'm looking at the Military Photos dot net website this morning and there is a post talking about a military air base in Northwest Iraq, so I look it up on Google Maps and sure enough, there it is, until I zoom in for a closer look and then it disappears and is replaced by an image of the airport that was there before. Well, that's kind of curious, but not all that interesting. Let's see what else there is to see around here. I zoom out and notice a jag in the border with Jordan. Jordan is kind of a funny shaped country anyway, what with that "hatchet handle" (one of my school teachers' terms) sticking out to the East. Who knows why it is that way, but this jag is in the end of the handle, and it's not all that big, maybe 10 miles across. This is the middle of the desert. Why would anyone care where the fool border is way out here? Well, maybe there is something here worth quibbling over. Zoom in a bit and I find there is something, an old, abandoned air base. Look it up on Wikipedia and find that it is one of five built by the Yugoslavians 35 years ago. Okay, crazed despot has dreams of many giant airbases in the middle of nowhere. Why? No explanation for crazy. But in the Wikipedia article (and repeated in several similar articles on similar places) is this:

In addition, underground facilities that could shelter between four and ten aircraft on average were constructed. In order to build these the Yugoslavs used equipment and construction techniques identical to that use in underground oil-storage depots, additionally concealing the extension and the true purpose of the whole project. The underground facilities were all hardened to withstand a direct hit by a tactical nuclear bomb, buried up to 50 meters below the ground and consisted of the main aircraft "hangar" (consisting of two floors in several cases, connected by 40ts hydraulic lifts), connected with operations, maintenance, and logistical facilities via a net of underground corridors.

Well, that's just crazy, but when you are dealing with the military and paranoia, nothing is too far round the bend, so I go looking for confirmation. I don't find any, but I do find reports of underground airbases in Albania and China. Albania's look a little sad. Hard to tell about the Chinese. Well, they are inscrutable.

"Eat The Rich" by P. J. O'Rourke

Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics

Just finished reading this. A great book. He goes around the world trying to figure out why some places are successful and some aren't. Russia, Albania, Hong Kong are just a few of his stops. The book was written ten years ago, so some of the history is a little dated, but enlightening none-the-less. He gives you a man-on-the-ground perspective of what life is like in these places and tries to reconcile what he sees with what he knows about the government and published economic statistics. Sometimes his died-in-the-wool Republicanism shows through, but given what he's reporting, it's understandable. Laissez-faire economics works best, but you do need a certain amount of government. Tanzania is one example of an economic failure. To me it sounds fairly neglected, which may be the best an African country could hope for. However, over $20 billion has been pumped into this country, apparently without any result at all.

Update November 2017 let Blogger 'fix' the html, which lost the picture, which I replaced.