Wing Walking Tennis

Novak Djokovic plays tennis on wings of flying plane - SPEED WingTennis
HEAD Tennis

Heck of a stunt. It has been done before.

Gladys Roy and Ivan Unger play tennis on the wing of a biplane in flight, 1925

History of Yesterday and Snopes have pages about this stunt.

Via Joe Rogan

ARCTIC - Netflix Movie

ARCTIC | Official Trailer
Bleecker Street

Grim movie about survival in the Arctic.

Man (Mads Mikkelsen) alone with the wreckage of his airplane, an AN-2, in the Arctic. He's been there for a few days at least. He's carved out a giant SOS in the snow, down through a couple feet of snow to the bare ground. The letters are like fifty feet tall, big enough that a passing aircraft should be able to see them. He's cut a couple of holes in the ice and is managing to catch some fish. He doesn't have any fuel for any kind of fire, so he's eating them raw. He has a hand cranked radio and every day he hikes to the top a nearby hill and cranks the radio and the radio blinks its red light at him.

One day while cranking the radio the green light blinks and shortly thereafter a helicopter appears, and immediately crashes. The pilot dies. The female copilot survives but she is comatose. He hauls her back to his airplane, which has the advantage of being right side up and level. They stay there for a few days, long enough for him to expand his ice fishing empire, but eventually he decides they need to travel to some kind of outpost. Pretty sad commentary on the local rescue service that they weren't able to get back out to where the last helicopter crashed. So Mads packs up his gear and loads the woman on a rescue sled that he found in the crashed helicopter, and starts hiking across the Arctic.

He does okay for a couple of days, but then he starts running into problems. He struggles but eventually he gets to the top of a hill and spots a live helicopter. The helicopter crew eventually spots him and all is well.

AN-2 Flies to Glorious Death for Motherland!

Russia's New Secret Weapon Against Ukraine? 75 Year Old Biplanes!
Mark Felton Productions
War seems to be becoming a battle of machine versus machine. Russia is turning the venerable An2 into an attack drone. The An2 has shown up here a few times.

Seshcha Airbase
Moscow, Kiev, Azerbaijan and Armenia

The Seshcha airbase (at the 2 minute mark) was a little hard to track down. Google Maps can't find it. Supposedly it is near Dubrovka, but Dubrovka is near St. Petersburg which is a long way from Ukraine. Wikipedia has the coordinates of the airbase. There is another, smaller Dubrovka near the airbase. The airbase has an unusual layout.

Seshcha Airbase

I couldn't find any features that agree with what's shown in the video, but maybe I've got the wrong Seshcha.

An2

An2

This one is powered by a radial engine unlike the last one which was turbine powered. Mont-Saint-Michel in the background. An2 has been here before.

Turbo An2

Turbo AN2M

A turbine powered biplane! What won't they think of next?

During 2013, Antonov announced that it had successfully flown for the first time a new version of the An-2, dubbed the An-2-100, which was fitted with a three-blade reversible propeller and a 1,100-kilowatt (1,500 shp) Motor Sich MS-14 turboprop running on kerosene rather than Avgas, which is no longer produced in CIS countries. That same year, the company stated that it had received orders for upgrading "hundreds" of the An-2 planes still in operation in Azerbaijan, Cuba and Russia to the An-2-100 upgrade version. - Wikipedia

There are still a bunch of An2's out there flying around. 

Antonov sees a considerable potential market for the An-2-100, as there are over 54 An-2s flying in Ukraine alone, with around 330 more still flying in Russia and up to another 1,200 grounded there. Antonov says another 290 An-2s are flying in Kazakhstan, 143 in Uzbekistan, 89 in Turkmenistan, 82 in Belarus, 63 in Azerbaijan, 30 in Kyrgyzstan, 13 in Moldova and 4 in Armenia. - FlightGlobal

Avgas is no longer being produced in CIS countries? Well, there's Avgas and there's Avgas. At least one Russian outfit is still producing 100LL.

 

Let's Build An Airplane

My daughter's father-in-law is a doctor on Treasure Island. It has some other Spanish name that I can never remember. Rumor has it that it was the model for the island in the book Treasure Island. I liked the book, so that's what I call it. Treasure Island is part of Cuba, and Cuba, being run by the commies, is impoverished. So I was thinking that the next time somebody goes to visit, they should take a package of medical supplies, you know, stuff that would actually be useful as opposed to trinkets and cute clothes and other such clap-trap as people see and want.

Catamaran Ferry Iris, Cuba

But then I realized that the contents of the package were immaterial compared to the difficulty of getting it there. You can fly to any number of cities on the main island, but getting to Treasure Island is kind of a pain. There is a ferry (a French catamaran, above), but space is limited, tickets are hard to get, you might have to wait a day or two to get on board.

Antonov AN-2 at the Rafael Cabrera Mustelier Airport

There is a semi-regular air service, but the plane is old and small and not all that regular. With demand as high as it is, they obviously need more capacity of some sort.

Now the first world solution to this kind of problem is to buy a ship or an airliner from an established manufacturer and then extract a continuous stream of cash from the sale of tickets. On one hand this makes good economic sense, but on the other, Cuba is impoverished. I'm not sure ticket sales would be enough to pay first world prices for first world equipment. I don't know how they paid for the ferry. Maybe somebody gave it to them. Or maybe I know nothing of communist finance.

What Cuba, and every other impoverished nation needs, is an industrial base so they can build their own stuff. Building airplanes might be just the ticket. Obviously they wouldn't be able to compete on the world market, because the world market wants stuff that is certified safe by the great government bureaucracies that certify such things. But for the parts of the world that are not part of the first world, a home grown aircraft might be just the ticket.

When I first started writing this diatribe, I was going to go off now on how it should be a simple matter for Cuba, with its highly educated workforce, to go into the aircraft manufacturing business. I mean the biggest part of building an airplane is putting the fuselage together and that's just a matter of sheet metal and rivets. Back in WW2 we put a nation of farmers to work building a glorious fleet of aircraft, and by glorious I mean enormous. I suspect that the USA produced on the order of 100,000 aircraft during WW2. So it really shouldn't be that difficult for Cuba to start building their own aircraft, especially since most of the 3rd world could use a nice cheap, sturdy, small airplane.

But then I read about the fastest ship on the block. Turns out it is made in Tasmania, an island off the south Coast of Australia, an island with no industrial base, no coal mines, no bauxite mines, no giant power plants. How could they possibly hope to compete on the world stage? What's wrong with these people, don't they know you can't do that?

Supposedly one of the reasons the USA has been so successful is because of its industrial might, and we were able to develop that because we have big iron and coal deposits. Tasmania doesn't have any of that. I'm pretty sure their aluminum is imported, maybe even from China, and they were still able to develop a successful industrial scale operation. And it is successful, they are selling their boats all over the world.

Maybe I'm thick, but I can't see any reason why Tasmania should be so successful and Cuba should be such a frigging disaster, other than the fact that the Castro brothers are made-men in the mafia founded by Stalin. It's enough to make you a commie hatin' redneck.

Update January 2023 Replaced a stinky link with better one and a dead link with a good one. See the whole story here.

Fast Food

Ronald McDonald - Antonov An-2R - Budapest, Hungary, April 18, 2003. 

 Taco Time in downtown Hillsboro is closing, which is too bad. Today was their last day. Thank god for fast food, otherwise I might have to cook, and cooking implies dirty pots and pans, which means somebody should do the dishes, and since I will avoid my chores if at all possible, this leads to guilt, and I really don't need any more guilt. I have a hard enough time ignoring all the guilt I already have without piling on more. Fortunately there are a good half dozen fast food joints within about three miles, so it isn't too arduous to run out and get something.
    I like McDonald's for their breakfast burritos and their coffee, and their $1 menu when I am feeling cheap. My wife likes Black Rock coffee across from Shute Park. I like fresh brewed coffee. I like it even better when I don't have to make it. Black Rock wants $2.50 for a medium coffee, which is slightly larger than the McDonald's cup, but I know most of the people who work there even though I only stop by maybe a couple of times a month. I know one person at McDonald's. "Know" may be a bit strong, I recognize them, and they do a passable job of pretending to recognize me. I dunno, maybe they actually do. Some people are really good at that. I am not one of those people.
    I heard about McDonald's offering budget advice for their employees. I don't know that anyone aspires to make a career out of working at McDonald's. A manager might earn a living wage, but I doubt anyone else does. At best it's a temporary gig to cover your expenses until something better comes along. I wonder if the baristas who work in coffee kiosks make more than people working at McDonald's. I will tip them 50 cents when I get a cup there (or a dollar for two). There is no tip jar at McDonald's.
    I suppose that in the current economy there are people who would be glad to get a job at McDonald's. Sad state of affairs.
    Rumor has it that fast food restaurants could afford to pay people more money, possibly even a decent wage without having to raise their prices significantly, but in a cutthroat business in a cutthroat economy that would destroy you. Until we have fewer people looking for work wages aren't going anywhere. Some people might argue that if workers made more money, they would spend more money, which would stimulate the economy, which would mean more jobs, which would mean wages would go up. It's an interesting theory, but I doubt anyone is going to implement it. The last person to try something that radical was Henry Ford when he started paying his assembly line workers $5 a day, and look what happened to him: he grew old and died, and they are still using his name on cars. Is it doing him any good now that he's dead? No, it's not. Now you may argue that his generous wages had nothing to do with his demise, and you might be right. But are you willing to take that chance?

Antonov AN-2 Colt

It is a Russian airplane and it looks like it was designed in 1929, but according to Wikipedia it was 1949. It is still being produced in China. I don't know how we got on the subject, but Marc was telling us about the starting procedure at lunch today. Here's a clip.



There is a tank of compressed air. When the pilot turns the handle on the dashboard it opens up a valve. The compressed air is released to start turning a flywheel. You can here the whine increasing in pitch as it comes up to speed. Notice that the propeller is not turning yet. When the flywheel is turning fast enough, the pilot engages a clutch that connects the flywheel to the crank and the engine starts turning, and hopefully starts running.

Sounds like a complicated way to get an engine to start, but evidently it is practical because it works in Russia where temperatures get downright cold.

As a bonus, notice the apparently curved propeller blades after the engine finally catches.