It's happened to you...

[tgibson]

Hi,

Ah, back "home" at EHAM and all is well.

Ralf, you are certainly welcome - this kind of thing is exactly why I decided to do the whole world's AI traffic.

PS. Finnair never had Electras - they went right from Convairs to Caravelles. That's a Convair taking off in 1959.

Thanks,

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

This late '50s AI is soooo good - you could spend your whole life flying around the Cal Classic world & still not see everything!

However, a small Schiphol diversion before we fly off to Germany. Yesterday I managed to get into (reality) work & went out at lunchtime just to check how deep the car had been buried in snow. Near the carpark there's a charity shop which sometimes has interesting books in a little room at the back, so went to have a look at that. Struck gold with a rather depressing 1980 volume called International Airport by Gaynor Cauter, whoever she is.

It includes this late '70s shot of you-know-where:

You may also be interested in these pictures, only taken a couple of years ago, of old-fashioned style boarding onto a KLM 737:

Ah, the romance of air travel. The grumpy stewardess there, probably wondering whether I really am just an aeroplane nerd taking a picture, or if it's a terrorist on his dry bomb-run. Unfortunately the sexy stewardess (who was skinny & covered in freckles) managed to avoid being photographed (though she did give me my prized KLM biro!)

Although this was going to Schiphol, it was taken at Heathrow.PH-BTI Niels Bohr, named after the famous Danish physicist, was waiting amongst dozens of British Airways planes. As the bus drove towards them one nervous passenger panicked and shouted 'I thought this was the KLM bus!' At least the aviation nerd was able to point out to her that we were, indeed, heading towards a Dutch aircraft. Here's a better shot of it:

Yeah, they waited while I jumped out, ran round and took that one.

But back in 1959 it was this wonderful Convair CV-340, Vincent van Gough, that our friends the Carters travelled in:

By a happy coincidence, the flyable fs9 version (KLM livery onto the Cal Classic base, as with the DC-7C) is the very one they went by:

The guy with the 'tache is thinking 'What's that smell of cheese?' Here's a comparison with the door of the model:

You may also have noticed the famous KLM platformbus, which Jaap kindly sent me to add to his EHAM 1963 scenery:

It just gets better and better, doesn't it?

 

[Jagdflieger]

Sure glad they haven't lost their cheese permeated KLM bags to overly inquisitive customs agents. That's a good harbinger of continued good luck on their European tour.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Well, the Carters are about to get a bit jittery about going into West Germany (where they will have trouble with bread), and worse, the Communist East. I'm a bit worried by Germany myself because my old sparring partner Bockholt might turn up there; but maybe I'm being paranoid. He's not exactly an enemy, but then he's not exactly a friend either. Wherever he is, he will certainly be hanging around aircraft; maybe working for Lufthansa? but he might have joined some sort of piratical outfit like the notorious Mercair. Just don't know.

To get back to Amsterdam - Hamburg (EHAM - EDDH):

This is the map of the route:

It's fairly boring: we just fly south of the Ijsselmeer, over Groningen, over the border into Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen), cross the River Weser between Bremen and Bremerhaven and come down into Hamburg which is on the River Elbe. The Rhine, which flows into the North Sea at Rotterdam, is of course already behind us.

Still having a good look round at Schiphol. There goes that Martinair DC-3 we noticed yesterday:

Martin's Luchtveroer Maatschappij NV, also based here like KLM - they were still operating those DC-3s into the '70s. You can just see his tail disappearing in this tower shot:

Then we moved off and something even more interesting appeared...

That German F104. As Ferry has pointed out, it's been made under licence at the Fokker factory and is now been flown over to Germany to join the Luftwaffe. A closer look at it:

He took off just before us and I managed to get this shot of the afterburner (must be pretty at night):

You can also see the building site for the new terminal going up there. Even if we are flying the same way, don't think we'll ever catch up with that Starfighter. Had to wait for this to land too:

Then we were off!

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Turnaround & climb out of Schiphol, these Convairs are fun to fly:

Quite apart from Handling Notes, there's a CV & Martin Mini Tutorial which comes with your Cal Classic downloads & teaches everything you need to know to fly them realistically. Here's Groningen Airport:

The poor old Microsoft ATC actors gave up on pronouncing that one and just said "Approach". I do need to spend some time with Edit Voicepack to improve a few of the aircraft: the L-188 was called "Lockheed 749" by ATC, but this Convair comes out as "KLM 340". Of course it would be nice to get rid of all the "Experimentals" that pop up everywhere, though the Cal Classic AIs usually have the right airline or type. This exotic, which whizzed by near Groningen, was described as "biplane":

We cross the Jade:

This river estuary was important to the Imperial German Navy and the Kaiser's dreadnoughts were always hanging out there. That small airstrip probably has/had a military application. On this map you can see we're about to cross the mouth of the Elbe:

I wasn't drunk. They told me to fly like that. Hamburg below:

You can see the TV Tower, called the Heinrich Hartz Turm, there. It was actually built 1965-68, but I have installed the Hamburg 2003 scenery. It's an airport I've landed at in reality, and you do get spectacular views of the huge city during the approach.

The default may be OK, but Hamburg 2003 improves an enormous area. Nice railway bridges, I also like the churches & it's always good to get some ships into major docks:

Time for the joke about when German students did an exchange to a British school in the '70s. English boy: "Where do you come from?"
German boy: "I am vrom Hamburg."
English boy: "Oh, my dad used to work there."
German: "Vhat did he do zere?"
English: "He bombed it."

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

We land on German soil - well, concrete:

There's that tower again, it's 670ft/204m tall. Guess what airline we're going to find here?

Smart livery for a Viscount 800 something? plus a couple of CV-440s. And a very pretty Lufthansa Connie is lurking in the background:

Despite the enhanced scenery this is still just a default MS airport. You can put in the modern one, but of course I'm holding out for the 60s Scenery Project to get round to it. The modern airport might also upset Tom Gibson's 1959 AI. Default airports are easy to park in though, aren't they?

Here's a slightly better shot of the whole German L-749:

No sign of Bockholt...or anyone for that matter!

 

[tgibson]

Hi,

Nice flight!

The Lufthansa Connie is actually an L-1049G Super Constellation. By the time LH was allowed to fly international routes (1955-56?) the L-749 had already been replaced in the catalog by the "Queen of the Connies". Some give that honor to the Starliner, but it wasn't really called a Constellation, was it? LH didn't order it with radar and thus the stubby nose, which can make ID a bit confusing. Air France did the same thing, BTW.

Thanks,

 

[spraycan]

Nice travel report again Ralf.
Mr. Glenmore and Mrs. Carter sure are sending KLM all over Europe

Anyone who would also like to have those KLM platform buses added to their scenery of EHAM 1963 send me a pm with an e-mail address and I will send you the download link.

Cheers,
Jaap

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Thanks, chaps; these are the men who made the whole 1959 flight re-creatable for our virtual Carters. :salute: The salutin' smiley, er, salutes you both!

With Constellations I tend to lazily assume that if it hasn't got extra tanks at the end of the wings, it's just an L-749, though the stretch is quite discernable. One of my books says that the L-1649A Starliner was in service from October 1956 and only 43 were made. 99 L-1049Gs had been produced, first delivered to Northwest Airlines in January '55; so Lufthansa must have got them after that & they did have some of the Starliners too, along with TWA (of course!) and Air France.

Mrs Carter had her problem with German food in Hamburg. Here's a typical paragraph from her book:

A good vegetarian meal was ordered which was served from a large platter. By the time we had all stopped our hunger pains, the platter was cleared of food. To our surprise, bread was never served. We had to make a special order for it and they made it scanty. The music was beautiful and the waiters were courteous. Their orchestra played "Isle of Capri". How I enjoy music when they keep it to an intelligent tune.

(Not that new-fangled Devil's Music Rock 'n'Roll then). Asking for a vegetarian meal in Germany is a bit like ordering a round of pork sausages in Israel, especially in 1959. The Dutch enjoy cheese and cold meats for breakfast - the Germans like RAW meat (actually very good when you get over the initial worry about how fresh it has to be). She also remarked that The business section [of downtown Hamburg] was like that of most large cities. This dull & obvious remark might have been due to surprise that it was there at all, bearing in mind all the film they'd have seen of the devastation caused by WW2 bombing.

Here's a 1944 cartoon by the great Carl Giles shows which what Hamburg would had looked like only a few years earlier:

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

In Hamburg the Carters visited the Adventhaus 'a large publishing house operated by our organization.' This is still going half a century later (I googled it) and appears to be a Christian mission. It seems that they took advantage of winning the holiday prize to act as ambassadors for the US side of their organization, visiting Europe on its behalf. Mrs C is somewhat secretive about it; though that may have been wise, especially when they go to Communist Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, it might then have been wiser not to write the book at all - though obviously it contains a big plug for KLM, who may well have encouraged it.

Plugging KLM means not mentioning any other airlines, so all she said about leaving Hamburg was The flight to Berlin was on another line and in about a couple of hours we were landing. [sic] If it took THAT long maybe they went in a DC-3, but I have arranged something a bit more comfortable for our version of the trip:

Yes, it's one of those Lufthansa CV-440 Metropolitans. This is D-ACAT, in the right livery for '59, but you can add a choice of 4 West German schemes to the Cal Classic base. (We'll be meeting back up with KLM in Vienna, after checking out West and East German airlines). Maybe KLM gave me a few days off to follow those Carters; they're certainly prime suspects in the Great Late '50s Cheese Shortage that has struck Europe this winter!

A very simple flight EDDH - EDDI (Berlin, Tempelhof) following the River Weser:

Stuck with the surprisingly low 5000ft that they assigned, it's less than an hour by Convair. This attractive Swiss equivalent was parked next to us (you can also see cargo cranes down by the river in the background):

Managed to restrain the Carters from going off with that cheese-loving nation (though they will get there eventually!). Is this a Lufthansa Starliner on the other side?

No, think it's another L-1049G, but with the extra fuel tanks. Here's the view from the end of RW5:

Kindly taken by Wolfram von Pohl, the Lufthansa pilot (they let me sit in the spare crew transfer seat). None of the Germans seemed to have heard of Ludwig Bockholt, so I doubt if he's currently working for Lufthansa. Must stop worrying about him; I'm here to look after the Carters.

Climb & turn towards that river...

 

[tgibson]

Hi,

Nice choice -those new paints are really nice.

However, Lufthansa was not allowed to fly into Berlin. Only a single designated airline from each of the 4 powers could fly scheduled service into Berlin. So BEA, Air France, and Pan Am were your choices for flying into West Berlin. Luckily for East Germany, Schoenfeld lies just *outside* Berlin, and thus has no such restrictions.

Hope this helps,

 

[Cees Donker]

Ralf,

You awoke my interest for these old airliners! Thanks!

:ernae:

Cees

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Oh dear! It was really kind of our German friends to take us in their beautiful state-of-the-art CV-440 - a perfect flight in fact - but illegal! As Tom says, only the Occupying Powers are allowed into Cold War Tempelhof, so we had to go back to Hamburg and start again. What to go in?

A British European Airways ad from the 1950s:

Well, the Viscount is obviously the Jewel in the Crown of that lot, but perhaps we'll save it for later when we go to Heathrow. Certainly the Airspeed Ambassador is an entertaining late piston-engined aircraft (dating from 1948). These were also known as Elizabethans (as in the ad above) and were named after famous men (no women!) from the reign of Elizabeth I (who obviously was a woman and could have had any of them, and the 20th Century sexists of BEA, executed...). Anyway, there's an excuse to show a picture of Cate Blanchett playing that sexy queen:

(The first of those Elizabeth movies was quite good, but the second one, with a feeble computer graphic 'Spanish Armada', was terrible). Where was I? Oh yes, the Elizabethan/Airspeed Ambassador. Here's the flyable fs9 version:

That's G-ALZS William Shakespeare in Hamburg at dawn one cold December morning. And here's the panel view:

One of those pushy Pan Ams shoving in front of us there. This panel is excellent - British readers will agree that the Daily Express is exactly the newspaper that a BEA pilot would have read (and the AP works well).

So now it was our British friends who gave us a lift. Captain Rob 'Roy' Macgregor (an Express reader) took us up, enabling me to get this quite good shot of the Lufthansa AI parked below:

The sun appeared and the Elizibassador (or is it an Ambethan?) flew along very nicely and surprisingly fast on its Bristol Centaurus 661 radial engines...

...but it was not to be (again)! Because BEA stopped using Ambassadors, or Elizabethans, or whatever they called them, in 1958. Bye bye Ambi...

No, dear friends, we shall be taking the Carters to Berlin in this:

Nobody knows the Why or the Where
Of why BEA called it a Pion-air;
To you and to me
It's a Dee Cee Three,
(Or you can call 'em Dakotas
With their Twin Wasp motors).​

...as Shakespeare would no doubt have written if they'd had airplanes in those days.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Well, of course Ambassador was the type, Elizabethan the class, and if the type was DC-3 then Pionair was the class. It seems to have been a sort of feeble pun on 'Air Pioneer' since they were mostly named after early aviators. Our particular G-AHCZ was Charles Sampson (not sure who exactly he was: not the world rodeo champion you get first if you google the name, that's for sure!). This repaint of the default is by Dale de Luca and although the livery is right for the period (as we shall see when it meets up with its AI equivalents), G-AHCZ, delivered to BEA in 1946, had actually been leased to Cambrian Airways a few months earlier in March '59.

Following that Pan Am and a Swissair Convair out at about midday. You'll want to see the map, it still takes less than hour despite what Mrs Carter said:

Of course the last stretch will be through one of the famous Air Corridors over East German Communist territory, as used in the 1948 Air Lift, another moment of glory for the immortal DC-3. Here's that Swiss CV-440 taking off in a Tower shot:

Don't know what that creepy building with the thing sticking out of it is. This is the restricted view you get out of a Dak from the VC, no doubt familiar to most readers:

Obviously the default DC-3 has its, um, faults; but a lot of nice repaints are available and, presumably just like the real aircraft to real pilots back in the day, it's an old friend. It was also interesting to fly it with the yoke & throttle quadrant as it certainly seemed to handle realistically, being much less responsive than snazzier aircraft are. Anyway, we got out of Hamburg and climbed to 5000 without difficulty:

As mentioned before, the route more or less follows the River Elbe.

We did fly quite near a town called Wittenberge which I thought might be where Martin Luther nailed up his famous 95 Theses and started Protestantism, but looking in the atlas I find that the German Church (or maybe the German Postal Service?) have renamed that one Lutherstadt Wittenberg and it's further south (in Dessau).

Berlin, City of Airports. Although we are getting very close to Tempelhof here, that is Gatow immediately below:

Very good scenery by Manfred Jahn, which you have to install to reopen the airport (closed in 1994) in fs9. Tom Gibson says that some of the Cal Classic AI does visit, though it looks quiet at that particular moment. Of course it was RAF Gatow and military stuff is, for the most part, beyond the Cal Classic brief.

Tempelhof ahead:

At least he's slowed down a bit for Final! Flaps halfway... We got 9R and you can see a DC-4 going for the other one.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

With a tail-dragger you have to remember to put the back end down once you are on the ground. Centre of the famous curved terminal building, one of the largest in the world:

Note that the Americans & Brits only put elevation up there in Feet (163), which must have constantly annoyed the Metric-minded French whenever they drove by! Our fellow-Pionairs were parked together on one side:

There is also one Frenchman there which I have failed to i/d: some sort of Sud-Ouest or Sud-Est? We'll get to see and learn plenty of those when the Carters go to Paris and the South of France later in their epic journey.

In the 60s Scenery Tempelhof that radar mast really revolves! Here's a closer look at the BEA Pionairs with that French fellow lurking in the background:

This is the sweep of the building looking towards the north...

...and to the south:

It is by Prof Ernst Sagebiel, sometimes known as the Luftwaffe Architect, and was begun in 1934. Hitler had well-known grandiose plans to rebuild Berlin and rename it Germania with this airport as the main entrance. Because it didn't appear to have much military use, it survived the War. When the Russians captured it in 1945 they discovered a secret factory making Junkers & Focke-Wulf aircraft in the cavernous basement levels of the terminal. This was so extensively booby-trapped that the Russian commander had it flooded. The flooded Nazi aircraft factory remains down there to this day, one of those weird facts from history that no writer would dare make up in fiction. Since it only closed to traffic in 2008, you do get a default Tempelhof in fs9. The real building remains lovingly preserved, but they've made it into a shopping mall or something much less romatic than a '30s airport.

While we were there this Martinair landed:

Is that possible? Or is it pretending to be a British Air Charter plane? The latter certainly did go to Tempelhof and later the British even managed to squeeze Comet 4Bs in (American 727s made it, but the French Caravelles needed longer runways). No jets when we were there this time; the DC-4 below arrived and parked amongst his countrymen:

I have a feeling that KLM deliberately didn't put the Carters on any of their old DC-3s, but imagine that other airlines had no such qualms. Why Mrs C said the flight took 'nearly two hours' remains a mystery, though she may simply not have remembered when writing it up later.

Anyway we have finally got them to Berlin in the middle of the Cold War.

 

[tgibson]

Hi Ralf,

Just to let you know I've released a major AI update this week - available on my AI Aircraft page. Now over 1000 liveries!

www.calclassic.com

Details of what's new here:

http://calclassic.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=2010

Thanks for a great trip so far,

Tom

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Yes, Berlin, City of Airports, Flughafenstadt. All four Occupying Powers needed at least one place to fly in & out, so they were kept going right up till the early '90s after the Wall had fallen. Now the once-Soviet Schoenberg is the only international passenger airport, having always been in a less central, less built-up area. The RAF used to fly a couple of reconnaissance DHC Chipmunks (!) out of Gatow, just to keep an eye on the Russians and maintain overflying rights. Here's one above Tempelhof so you can see the architecture properly:

It's supposed to be the shape of an eagle with the 'legs' as those two buildings facing the road and the main terminal as the 'wings'. Brilliant? Vulgar? Maybe somewhere in between (you can guess who's idea it probably was).

Another nice little plane to fly around in is this cute Me-108 Taifun (which, unlike the RAF trainer, probably wouldn't have been allowed at all). This D-EBEI is Ellie Beihorn, still kept going in the Lufthansa historic flight (though I don't think it was really yet theirs' in '59).

Flying completely illegally above the runways like this you can see Pan Am DC-4s landing on both at once:

Here's the Chippy going over the default Tegel Airport with its hexagonal terminal (should be octagonal, no AI):

Not right for 1959! Replaced with the retro one you can get from Cal Classics you'll have the proper French-run airport:

Lacking flyable French airliners of the time (except for Caravelles), I've visited in this military transport, a Nord Noratlas. We found some even more outlandish fat French aircraft there:

Breguet 763 Provence I think (and the foolish French have given two the same registration! As a bass is a kind of obese fish and Bass is a strong British beer, it seems appropriate).

Here's the Chippy about to get shot down for straying over to the East:

The big park in front is the famous Tiergarten and you can just make out the Reichstag, top right in the park, which we'll go down and take a closer look at.

The Lufthansa pilot has gone beserk and decided to overfly the Brandenberger Tor and try to land on Strasse des 17 Juni in the Tiergarten!

Mike Stevens created this marvellous Cold War scenery which will re-divide your default 21st Century Berlin when you get his East German scenery with Schoenberg Airport from Cal Classics.

This is Schoenberg; again, the Chipmunk could NOT have gone there, though we & the virtual Carters will soon be flying from it:

So we'll be taking a closer look at that mysterious Commie AI traffic later...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

If anything, Schoenberg is really more to the south, rather than the east of Berlin.

A closer look at the Brandenberger Tor and the Reichstag:

Borrowed that Jag to drive around on the ground for a change. There's the notorious Wall and one of its lookout towers. of course that didn't really appear (more or less overnight) till 1961, but you always had to stop and show your papers to armed men in order to cross between the free West and Soviet East. So many East Germans never went back that the Russians decided to make it rather more difficult for them. Our friends from Houston went to have a look:

Then out to the old Reichstag and Brandenberg Gate. The great Russian war memorial is nearby. Something happened to our very constitution when we saw the Russian soldiers marching. We could hardly tell whether our temperature went up or down.

...writes Mrs Carter. Machiavelli famously asked Whether it is better for a Prince to be feared or loved by his People? In Renaissance Italy he suggested striking a balance between the two. Subsequent political systems which have remained in power purely through the fear factor do go down in History as being pretty ghastly. After nearly 50 years of spying, bullying and gulags people in the Russian Empire finally had enough and, largely without bloodshed or outside help, managed to get rid of it. It is to be hoped that the same will happen to the millions who remain victims of Chinese imperialism. But of course freedom brings responsibilities and requires a higher level of intellegence, forgiveness and tolerance than many people can manage; it's always easier just to keep quiet and let the bullies go on running everything.

This must be the Carters' bus:

Those Volkspolizei (People's Police) Trabants without hubcaps have set up a Commie Cheeseblock which the Carters dare not cross!

It's a Mexican stand off - or maybe a Marxist one? The Jag does shine forth somewhat as an example of the sort of lovely thing the evil capitalist West offered which the Communist system simply couldn't manage to produce. One theory is that they never dared invade because the Eastern Bloc troops would immediately have realised that they'd been conned when they entered West Germany and discovered that everyone had two cars and a swimming pool...

It doesn't say much for any system when it has to keep its people behind walls, real or metaphorical.

That interesting building on the other side might be the Akademie der Künste, not sure. The Carters don't appearto have been that bothered by museums and art galleries, though many a delightful cheesy meal is mentioned. I have discovered that they were strict Seventh Day Adventists, which accounts for their vegetarianism & teetotalism (though, as mentioned earlier, Christ not only drank wine, He even turned boring old water into it).

 

[edmoore235]

Ralf, thank you so much - really a fun read - a great story of travel from the past. Take care.

Ed

(Eat more cheese)

 

[Cees Donker]

I gave this thread 5 stars. Should have been more!

:ernae::ernae::ernae:

Cees