It's happened to you...

[Ralf Roggeveen]

In fact the Carters were driven across the iron curtain: "The only way to get to the Russian side was by the Lufthansa taxi and that we got" says Mrs C. (somewhat ungrammatically). This is interesting from an aviation point-of-view, because it suggests that, at least until the Wall went up, you could fairly easily access the one airport, Schönefeld, that Lufthansa were allowed to use in Berlin. Yet Lufthansa had itself been split into Western and Eastern elements, run and equipped quite separately. In 1963 this was to lead to a court case, held in neutral Switzerland, as to who had the legal right to be called Lufthansa; there couldn't logically be two of them. The West won, and the eastern Lufthansa had to be renamed Interflug (Obviously they were reunited properly after 1989 when the whole of Germany became a single state once more).

Guess who supplied the eastern Lufthansa/Interflug with aircraft?

Yes, it's an Ilyushin Il-18V. Note that although it still says Deutsche Lufthansa and has the Lufthansa logo, it also has the East German (DDR) flag...



...and a DM registration. Oh yes, and it's as Russian as a regiment of Cossacks. And so is the fs9 download, which isn't bad (actually the earlier 18D), and can, with a bit of work on the Cfg. file, be repainted East German.

But even better than that is Mike Stevens' Schönefeld, which we only saw from above before. Fans of Soviet hardware will be drooling at the sight of...

...Antonov AN-2s! In fact, this turned out to be quite a good day for them. As it is such an interesting airplane, and I have seen a real one (a few years ago at Goodwood), here it is:

That car is something like a ZIL (Ferry will probably know). Some other mouthwatering aircraft in the background - and a nice (Italian) scooter!

Here we are approaching the main terminal buildings, Il-14s parked on the right. You might like to see the Russian 2-D screen:

And there's the Commie crowd waiting for their airplane. Can you see the policemen with (East) German Shepherds? Some of the women were stunning, but many smart people there must have been visiting capitalists from the West.

That Soviet Il-14 seems to have been given preferential parking (not surprising really).

The Carters got to the Lufthansa bus stop, BUT there was one little thing that upset us. When the taxi driver got us there we found that one piece of our luggage had been left at the hotel, and it would be the bag that had all our wearing clothes. We had only about fifteen minutes to wait for the transportation to the Russian airport. it didn't take long to get right sick in the pit of our stomachs with such news being real.

[She was from Georgia, which shows in her English there; but we've all had similar travel disasters and can easily empathise...]

To our surprise, the good hotel man at the Plaza had found the suitbag and had sent another taxi with it. The sight of that piece of luggage cured all ills momentarily. Glenmore gladly paid the driver, but that never commenced to pay our gratitude to the good hotel manager that had been so kind to us by seeing that the bag reached us.

Good old Germans!

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Now that they've been reunited with all their luggage, let's take the Carters down to what was then Communist Czechoslovakia. Despite the attractive Il-18, I've decided to go in the more commonplace Il-14, probably right for the 45 minute flight (18Vs only appeared in 1959, and that paintscheme was from the early '60s). Managed to arrange a lift again; but we'll pick up a trustworthy Dutch plane at the other end.

ATC had radioed ahead to the pilot, who was flying in from somewhere else, to say that a KLM officer had been given permission to accompany them. As no other extra aircrew were being transferred, that was fine, and anyway I had to get to Prague to fly the Carters on to Vienna.

But you can imagine my surprise when I was strapping myself into the jumpseat and the Captain of that Il-14 turned to greet me...

...and it was Ludwig Bockholt! (He looks a bit like Simon Cowell in this picture, but maybe that's just arrogance?). "Ach! Hollander," he said, followed by the mysterious question "Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib aus der alten Hauptstadt Prag?"

Well, my German is pretty good, but how the hell should I know what the soldier's wife, whoever she was, got from the ancient City of Prague? Then he introduced me to his First Officer, a fellow with a sinister smile identified as Comrade Eulenspiegel. Here's the route we've now got to trust them with:

You can see that it finally starts to get a bit mountainous towards the border. We go quite close to Dresden. Here is a clearer view of Bockholt's Il-14:

Obviously I was extremely surprised to find him working for the Communists. I know he never liked the Nazis much (though he had ended up flying Me262s for them in these very Berlin skies at the end of WW2), but, if anything, his heart lies with the Kaiser and his Zeppelins of the old Imperial Germany Navy. Of course I was mulling all this over in my mind while he and the creepy Eulenspiegel were busy with their pre-flight checks.

I hope the Carters' bags weren't amongst this luggage that got left behind...

Maybe it was for the passengers who disembarked there? Looks capitalist though. The Soviet Bloc air travel joke used to be that there was only one design of cheap suitcase available, so nobody knew whose was whose as dozens of identical bags went round on the luggage carousel!

We pass the other Il-14s:

It does look like a front-wheeled DC-3, doesn't it? Must be the shape of the windows. These buildings are worth taking a look at to see more of what a wonderful job Mike Stevens has done:

Clearly there was construction work going on at the time, and now the airport has expanded a lot. You can tell that there was plenty of room for expansion since Bockholt drove us a long way from the terminal buildings to Runway 7R:

Then we were off outa there!

So I find myself in a Russian plane flown by a mad Zeppelin pilot heading deep into the Soviet Empire in the middle of the Cold War, keeping an eye on a couple of Texan vegetarian cheese thieves. Hmm, interesting situation Roggeveen...

 

[tgibson]

Gulp! I hope they make it out of the East Bloc OK. But then they are flying to Prague, which was the "hub" of Eastern Europe for connections to the West, so that's a good thing.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

At least this short trip should be easy for Bockholt with all his flying experience. It was, after all, he who made the first intercontinental flight EVER (in L59, der Afrikaschiff). I'm surprised they haven't got him flying their Tupolev Tu-104 jets; he'd be good at it.

Auf Wiedersehen Berlin!

I was dying to know how such a character had ended up amongst the Baddies in the Cold War. Mind you, he always was on the other side, wasn't he? Trouble is, with someone like Bockholt you can't initiate a conversation. You have to wait for him to address you. But at least he knew how to handle that Ilyushin.

I was glad that we could rely on der Alte Bockholt's navigational skills, because ATC definitely wasn't so good this side of the Iron Curtain. The aircraft seemed to pitch up a bit, though nobody has any objections to being in an aeroplane that wants to be in the sky. (It's the ones that can't wait to get back to the ground that we worry about.)

Suddenly Bockholt turned to me and pointed out of his window at our Eleven o'clock...

Two more Antonovs flying by!

If only I'd had photos like this with me at the time, they might have thawed the atmosphere a bit:

I believe this had flown over from Russia and landed there on the small airfield in the middle of the Goodwood racetrack, though I didn't see it airborne.

In some ways this 1947 aircraft was the Russian equivalent of the DC-3 for short-haul passenger flights, so perhaps it isn't surprising to see them buzzing round 5000 feet above the 1950s. The jolly little (well, quite big) biplanes seemed to present an opportunity to speak to the veteran aviator. 'Kapitanleutnant Bockholt! What are you doing working for the, er, Socialists?' I enquired.

'Never mind about me!' he snapped, 'What about the Amerikaners, Hollander?'

Uh-oh, the East Germans are interested in the Carters, I thought. Luckily Bockholt was occupied in bringing us down into Czechoslovakia at that particular moment:

A bit fast, but he got all the flaps and (more importantly) the undercarriage, down and did a pretty good landing there. At least I had time to make up excuses for the Carters. KLM would never forgive me if they ended up in the gulag! (Siberia definitely was NOT included in their holiday schedule).

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Oh yes, Czechoslovakia was an important country for aviation even before the Second World War. Prague was one of our stopovers on the great Amsterdam - Batavia route, though we used the old military field at Kbely before they opened this airport, Ruznye, in '37.

Afraid we have to make do with the default fs9 one, though there's some nice AI courtesy of Mr Gibson & Cal Classics.

Thought I could see one of those Tupolev jets up there and blurted out to Bockholt: 'Why don't you fly that?'

'Look closer, Hollander,' he replied...

...and it was true; they've removed the wheels.

'If you want to see your beloved polders again, Hollander, you had better tell me everything you know about the Amerikaners,' continued Bockholt in a threatening manner.

'What's to tell? They are perfectly harmless. Vegetarians in fact.'

'So was Gandhi, but he defeated the British Empire when all the armies of Asia had failed!' observed the ex-Zep pilot.

'So was Hit...Er, anyway, they are good christians and they won a competition with KLM.'

'Protestant or Catholic?' (This had obviously touched a soft spot inside Bockholt's cold heart; you may recall from that scary Sunday service he once conducted in an Italian airship over a stormy Mediterranean that he's a Lutheran lay preacher).

'Seventh Day Adventists as far as I know,' I replied.

I was trying to admire all the Ceskoslovenske Aerolinie (CSA) stuff lined up outside (in my 1973 book they still had 21 Il-14s and 4 of those Tu-104As).

While Bockholt was parking something of interest arrived and settled into the next space:

It's a Transporturile Aeriene Romane (Tarom) from Rumania. [Free strange aviation fact: Later the Rumanians got BAC-One Elevens from the British and even built them under licence in Rumania, right up into the 1980s].

Bockholt & Eulenspiegel switched off our engines and, at that very moment, I remembered the answer to his original cryptic question about the soldier's wife!

'Aus Prag bekam sie die Stockel-shuh
Einen Gruss und dazu
Die Stockel-schue
das bekam sie aus der Haupt-stadt Prag!' I announced triumphantly, and a big grin spread across Bockholt's arrogant face.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Whether I'd cracked some kind of STASI code by remembering the words of the Kurt Weil song and saying that she got the high-heeled shoes from the ancient City of Prague, I don't know; but at least it put Bockholt in a good mood. I knew now that he would definitely leave the innocent Carters alone. He and Eulenspiegel didn't exactly invite me for a foaming Budwar, but they did smile a lot and pat me on the shoulder (which is about the most friendly Bockholt has ever been). Anyway, they had to let me go because Vincent van Gough was waiting to be piloted:

That's the great aeroplane, not the great artist, though obviously it's named after him. And here it is, later that afternoon, parked next to an extremely exotic carrier. Looks like a DC-4. In 1973 Ariana Afghan had the rather odd fleet of 2 Boeing 727-113Cs, one CV-440 and one DC-3. So with a few plastic kits you could have built a scale model of the whole airline in a weekend! And at least the efficient Czechs have now got the wheels back on their jet.

Our route LKPR - LOWW:

This is less than 40 minutes, but gets us back into the Free World. Sarah Carter tells us that The address of our organization's headquarters in Prague had been given to the driver and soon we were there. We didn't dare let them know we were coming or tell anyone our plans or we probably would have been stopped. Just the right number on the outside identified the building itself, but we were soon inside and when they found out who we were the workers there gave us a hearty welcome. With smiling faces they told us stories of the difficulties in their work...

Making sure that the Carters hadn't been abducted by the Czech Secret Police, or indeed by the soldier's wife in her high-heeled shoes, I drove them (yes, the Carters, not the soldier's wife) to the end of RW31...

...and breathed a sigh of relief as we left the ground!

That Tupolev seems to be firing up down there. It was getting to be late afternoon and people were flying about with their lights on:

Still mostly Soviet-made this side of the border/curtain. Good to be reunited with First Officer Dirk and the lovely Henriette Schripsema; we did a neat exit and climb, leaving Bockholt, Eulenspiegel, the Czech Seventh Day Adventists AND the soldier's wife behind us.

Actually Bockholt, Eulenspiegel, the soldier's wife and the Czech Secret police may be smashing up the Seventh Day Adventist HQ in Prague even as I think such thoughts... but we're not going to lose much sleep over that, are we?

As ever, it gets darker...

Vincent was a little buffeted by the quite strong wind (not as bad as we'd had in the Electra going to Scandinavia though), and at 7000 we were sometimes at exactly cloud height:

Could this river be the Danube?

Well, we flew over the Blue Nile in that BOAC Comet, so why not the Blue Danube in a KLM Convair?

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Or was it just Johann Strauss that called it the Blue Danube? Of course the Nile splits into its Blue and its White at Khartoum, and there's a Yellow River in China and a Red one in Canada (nowhere near the Red Sea though). Then there's the Yellow Sea and the Black Sea...

Something interesting politically happens as we approach our destination. If you look at the map you can see the border with Slovakia:

We just crossed over into it, quite near the capital Bratislava, before that turnaround for approach into Vienna. Aha, you're saying, but in 1959 the Czech Republic and Slovakia were united into a single Czechoslovakia, they only split after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet although it's true that the pair are now two separate, independent nations, between 1948 and '89 the Russians - who completely dominated the Warsaw Pact using brute force about once every decade when subject people got too interested in freedom - called them 'the Czech Socialist Republic' and 'the Slovak Socialist Republic'. This got them more votes in the UN, where every Soviet Empire 'state' was recognised as a separate 'country'. The Czechs and Slovaks got a close-up look at Warsaw Pact military hardware in 1968 when the thoroughly evil, ugly old Stalinist Brezhnev had enough of their attempts at mild independence of political action and invaded. This is quite well shown in Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being; also a movie with a lot of sex in it for those not so interested in the politics. If you run an enormous repressive Empire you can always deploy troops from thousands of miles away to eliminate rebellious people in the streets. I doubt if many of the Butchers of Tian An Men Square, for example, knew that they were in 'Beijing' (or even spoke Chinese), they just shot who they were told to shoot.

Up ahead the airport for Vienna, capital of Austria:

This is at Schwechat, more than 10 miles from the city, but officially just Flughafen Wien. Until 1918 this was the capital of the huge Hapsburg Empire which had included almost all of the Balkans, those Czechs and Slovaks, a lot of Poland and Hungary, as well as this Germanic heartland. If you want to know about that I cannot recommend enough the Ottokar Prohaska novels of John Biggins: A Sailor of Austria, The Emperor's Coloured Coat, The Two-Headed Eagle and Tomorrow the World. Informative, exciting and funny (and with airplanes and beautiful women!) - what more could you ask?

I believe the mountains in the distance are foothills of the Taurus Range (Tauern in German) which spread westwards through Austria towards Salzburg and the most impressive mountains in Europe, the Alps (which we'll be seeing later with those Texan cheese-addicts).

An AUA Austrian Airlines DC-4 waiting for us to leave the runway there. In reality they were just finishing a rebuild of this airport which opened in 1960, but this is another of Microsoft's default fs9 efforts. You will not, however, be disappointed by the Cal Classic traffic...

And this is the Land of beautiful music and cream cakes...

 

[tgibson]

Hi,

Great trip from the East to the West. Vienna was an interesting city in the 1950's and had something in common with Berlin. I'll leave it to you to explain.

BTW, also due to the situation alluded to above, Austrian Airlines did not get started until quite late in the 1950's, and then only had international flights until 1963 or so - no domestic flights. All they had in 1959 were a few Viscounts for their European services, which is what we see in your image above. They added DC-3's in 1963 for their domestic flights.

Hope this helps,

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Well of course Vienna was split into US, British, French and Russian Zones, just like Berlin, except that the Russians didn't get any other bits of Austria, which had been conquered entirely by Anglo/US forces in WW2. The situation is best shown in the 1949 movie The Third Man with Orson Welles as loveable war profiteer Harry Lime. The scriptwriter was British novelist Graham Greene, part of whose mission in life was to show that the British and Americans are just as bad to have as your enemies as the Russians are (he also, prophetically, wrote The Quiet American about Vietnam, the recent Michael Caine remake of which is much better than the old Audie Murphy one). Another literary version of postwar Vienna is in John Irving's World According to Garp, but much more is described in the book than in the not-so-good Robin Williams film version. Whatever you think of the British, however, they ran Vienna Airport and, as Tom G has pointed out, sold Viscounts to the Austrians.

We find some friends near the terminal:

Think it was a Swiss peeping round the corner there...

There's another Austrian Viscount, the curious sticking-up tail fins being a good recognition point. A Pan Am 707 (-120 I think) around that corner:

Another jet, neither British, American, nor Russian, was about to arrive, but first there was this Canadian L-1049 (not sure exactly which, probably a G? Anyway, a Super Connie):

He went to park round by the Pan Am.

There's the Dutch DC-6 leaving and an SAS Caravelle (like the one we recently saw parked at Kastrup) has arrived. A good view of the Austrian DC-3 which Tom mentioned:

Yup, it was all happening here at about 5 in the afternoon.

The Canadian Connie has rudely turned its tail to the newfangled American jet! What do you think of those people at the windows of the default MS terminal buildings? They truly look like lost souls and I kind of know how they must feel, having waited in similar circumstances at a few reality airports... Logan, Detroit, Philadelphia, Gatwick, you know who you are, you bad airports. No complaints, though, about being here in virtual Vienna.

We should wave goodbye to the snow on the next stretch of the Carter's Odyssey.

 

[tgibson]

Hi,

Yep, Vienna was partitioned, just like Berlin. According to Wikipedia (not the most authoritative of sources) there was a Russian Zone in Austria, and Vienna was right in the middle of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria

But you are right that it turned out differently than partitioned Germany - Austria regained its independence in 1955 - intact.

That Austrian DC-3 belongs to the charter affiliate, BTW.

Those people in the default terminal windows appear to be about 10 feet tall...

And yes, that TCA Super Connie is a G model, although they did have earlier C and E versions (some upgraded to Super G status) without the long radar noses.

Thanks,

 

[tgibson]

BTW, to have more informative AI labels, you can open your fs9.cfg file and edit this section so it appears as below:

[AContain]
ShowLabels=0
ShowUserLabel=0
ShowLabelManufacturer=0
ShowLabelModel=1
ShowLabelTailNumber=0
ShowLabelDistance=0
ShowLabelAltitude=0
ShowLabelAirline=0
ShowLabelAirlineAndFlightNumber=1
ShowLabelFlightPlan=1
ShowLabelContainerId=0
ShowLabelAirspeed=0
ShowLabelHeading=0
LabelDelay=1000
LabelColor=FFFF0000

If you want to see Distance, Altitude, and/or Airspeed set these to 1 as well. This will eliminate the not useful Manufacturer (all set to AI Propliner in my traffic), and add the aircraft model, airline, and flight plan for that plane.

The proper way to edit the cfg file:

1. Quit FS.
2. Open and edit the fs9.cfg file.
3. Save and quit the editing program.
4. Restart FS.

If you have downloaded and installed the Traffic Toolbox SDK dll file into the Modules folder (FS2004), you can also do this from the Tools/Settings menu.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555857

Hope this helps,

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

East Bloc Interval

Developing a bit of an interest in those Eastern Bloc aircraft after peeking behind that pesky Iron Curtain. Here's the Il-18 in its brand new early '60s Polskie Linie Lotnicze LOT livery:

Thank you very much for that Julius Czarnecki. It is at the (MS default) Warsaw Okecie Airport, where this interesting Li-2 was also spotted (and nearly collided with):

My old DC-3 book says, ruefully, 'Douglas has never received any royalty payments.' In Il-2 Forgotten Battles an Li-2 was the first aircraft I was ever perfectly lined up against (in a FW-190) and close enough to rip his wing off. And do you know? I couldn't do it, 'cos it was a Dak! I let him go. Willy will be proud of me.

Here are some more views of the rare Afghan (I now know its a British plane, but these pictures were taken back at Prague in that Aeroflot Il-18);

My wife had a friend whose mother was Dutch and her father was an Ariana Afghan pilot - quite an exotic mixture. She had inherited her father's dark colouring and was pretty good-looking. (This is fairly irrelevant except that its the closest I ever came to AAA in reality.)

The latest flyable AN-2 is a very, very good model (from Russia like the real thing):

Visiting the ancient City of Prague.

Now it's talking to an old Czech Comrade. The Tupolev trusts them.

This is the closest you get to a military VVS livery, being a modern Russian Air Force historic flight version. President Putin has let them have a Red Star, but has also insisted on the Tsarist Eagle there. Crazy. It seems to Roggeveen to represent a schizophrenic sense of national identity... or a lack of one. Fantastic Tupolev jets lined up in Moscow thanks to those good people at Cal Classics:

What if President Obama brought back the good old British Lion & Unicorn? King George III wasn't so bad, was he? Of course it's a ridiculous idea - but not in Putin's Russia it isn't! Anyway, nice model, but we need some classic airline repaints please. Maybe J. Czarnecki will do LOT?

Time to leave Vienna in Vincent:

Somewhat intimidated by where that Tupie had parked! It seems that Putin's KGB men are already after me (as if Bockholt & his STASI weren't bad enough).

So I repainted him a bit in exhaust fume grey ! We are now going on a three hour flight to a much warmer place...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

LOWW - LGAT:

We left at dawn, 07:00 hrs local time.

Passing an Air France Connie...

This shot was taken for the wonderful clouds. It was chilly, with an OAT of -7 Celcius:

Then we did what aeroplanes are best at and left the ground:

This flight is meant to be about three hours (though in the event it took a bit longer), so we could have gone for High Altitude Airways and been up at 29000 ft. But I chose only around 11000, hoping to enjoy the scenery a bit more that way. Mrs Carter mentions Belgrade and Thessalonika, both of which historic cities we will, indeed, overfly.

Not that the scenery was particularly inspiring. Despite that tantalising glimpse of the edge of the Taurus Range that we saw coming in to Vienna, the so-called North European Plain appears to stretch unbelievably far south!

It's not even interesting flat countryside (like man-made Holland ). Two quite large bodies of water: the Neusiedler See, just visible on the right above and in the previous map, and Lake Balaton...

...in Hungary. A small airstrip is visible below there. Some strange battles took place over this in WW2 (and in Il-2!) where American Mustangs coming from the West met Soviet Lavotchkins coming from the East and a lot of German Focke-Wulfs ended up... well, at the bottom of the lake. In 1959 the Hungarians were firmly in the Soviet camp, having had their visit from Warsaw Pact 'allies' and T-54s on the streets of the capital three years earlier...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

It's that river again, the Danube - except that here it's called the Duna...

...until you cross the border into Serbia, when it becomes the Dunav (or the Donau if you want to speak German). Of course in 1959 nobody went to Serbia and the Danube/Duna/Dunav/Donau wasn't busy defining the national border between Serbia and Croatia. Five modern countries made up

Yugoslavia

and they all behaved themselves and stayed united because President Tito told them to. Josip Broz Tito (a Croatian) had, of course, led the Communist partisans in WW2, though he did not like Stalin. The British, who were helping resistance forces throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, quickly realised that he was the person to back, not the Royalist Chetniks who ended up siding with the Germans. This enabled Yugoslavia to be a very happy Communist country until about ten years after Tito's death when it exploded into 1930s-style civil war, political racism and attempted genocide. The third of these lovely things was prevented by NATO (i.e. mainly American & British) intervention, which undoubtedly saved the Bosnian Muslims. (I am not sure if Islamic countries did anything whatsoever to help at the time; but this is always worth pointing out to anyone who imagines the Americans and their Allies are in Iraq and Afghanistan because they hate Muslims. It's terrorism and injustice that they hate).

Before we get to the capital of Serbia (which was also the capital of Yugoslavia), there's another big town to fly over, Novi Sad:

Still the Danube (it also marks the border between Bulgaria and Romania and comes out into the Black Sea in a huge delta to the east of Bucharest). Mrs Carter didn't notice Novi Sad, but she does mention a beautiful view of Belgrade as its lights glistened in the clear night air. So they must have gone in the evening. Here's Belgrade (Beograd in Serbo-Croat) by day:

After that, as you go south, things really do start to change geographically. You notice high ground at last...

...we are now flying over Macedonia. I believe it is OK to recognise this as a nation state now, though for a long time, including in my 2005 atlas, it had to be referred to as Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (or F.Y.R.O.M. for short!). Part of the problem is that three provinces of northern Greece are called Western, Central and Eastern Macedonia so many Greeks think that the former Yugoslav bit should now be part of Greece. At this point it is worth bearing in mind that a bit of France is called Brittany, but the French don't use this as an excuse to claim the rest of Britain). Anyway, let's just fly over them.

Just after those mountains, known as the Nidze and Kozuf Range, a miracle takes place (in fs9 if not in reality) and we see the last of the snow...

...We are coming to the warm Mediterranean lands. Did we have snow since Ireland? It'll only be on very high ground down here.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

in this map the aircraft is just leaving Macedonia and entering Greece (actually the province of Kentriki Makedonia/Central Macedonia).

And there is the Aegean Sea, the part of the Med to the East of Greece, up ahead. Sarah Carter got excited because they were at last coming to Bible lands. She never mentions Alexander, Achilles, Odysseus or Pericles, but Saint Paul is much on her mind. A little farther on our plane circled the port of Salonica, or Thessalonica as it was called in Paul's day. Well, it is true that he wrote not just one, but two Epistles to the Thessalonians, although he may not have been thinking exactly of Seventh Day Adventism when warning them against the mystery of iniquity (2 Thess. 2,7) and the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders (2 Thess. 2, 9). In modern Greek it is actually called Thessaloniki, but Thessalonica is still perfectly acceptable in English.

That's the city (second largest in Greece), and this is its airport...

No sign of any AI down there, but we will see a couple of old Douglases flying about in a minute.

Ja, das Meer ist blau, so blau, as Bockholt's sailors used to sing in that airship over these very waters (though they came from the Imperial German Navy Zeppelin base in Jamboli, Bulgaria of course). Or perhaps it is Homer's Wine-dark sea? (Whichever way you look at it, the German sailors and Homer definitely have a more poetic turn of phrase than Mrs Carter and Saint Paul). There goes a DC-3:

And here are some of the Isles of Greece (as Lord Byron would say. It's just the Isle (singular) of Greece to poor old Charlene):

Alonnisos on the left, Skopelos in the middle, and Skiathos - with its little airport - to the right. I have visited all three in reality, and possibly even landed at that airport (have to check old diaries & ask Mrs RR, who remembers these things better). I do recall an airport on one Greek island where there was a traffic light, occasionally red, to suggest to drivers that they might like to stop when an Airbus was about to cross the road at about 30 feet!

This one, however, looks like it only takes small Olympic propliners and private General Aviation.

Now Vincent is flying over Euboea (Evvoia in modern Greek; I prefer the classical name, two Vs just doesn't work in English, evver), a very large island just off the east coast of the mainland. You can drive over, but its still salt water under that bridge. In the case of the Peloponnese to the south, they've made it an 'island' by cutting the Corinth Canal through, which you can also drive or take a train to cross.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

And here's Charlene (a few years ago, as she's now 60). Older readers will recall that she's been to Paradise, but she's never been to Me. That's Her, not Me, if you see what I mean. Oh yes, and the Isle of Greece, wherever THAT is! Used to be indeed, 1982.

[This picture was, rather neatly, originally at the bottom of the last posting. Thought that had made it exactly 10 images, but forgot about the Greek flag, so the geographically-challenged lady has to appear here instead.]

Athens itself is somewhere down there to starboard, though you can only see some dull (aviation?) buildings in this shot:

I had to concentrate on manoeuvering round for our approach to RW33 without benefit of glideslope!

It's over Euboea in that map, there's a better Approach map to come below. Think this is the small island of Makronisi with the mainland beyond:

Charlene, if you are reading this, note that we have already identified five Greek islands by name and that there are in fact more than 300 of them.

A DC-6 - and another Greek island! We are now down to 5000 ft.

Now you can just make out the airport (the old one Hellinikon, not the new Eleftherios Venizelos) straight ahead. That was the moment I saw it, having to make an entirely visual landing, and I wish we'd been a few hundred feet lower! The promised Approach map:

I automatically (and in vain) switched the DME on, but it was not to be. At least I was able to throttle down enough to get 20 degrees of flaps and the excellent aeroplane descended beautifully at about -1.5 on the Vertical indicator.

Quite exciting, isn't it?

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Exciting news about the airport on Skiathos. I asked Mrs RR and she said that yes, we did go there one year when we were staying on Skopelos. In the cupboard I find a diary which mentions our flight there from London Gatwick in an Airbus A-300 (possibly an old B2, or maybe a 300-600?) in July 1999. This was with a now-defunct charter company called Flying Colours, a subsidiary of Thomas Cook. It might be interesting to try to land a flightsim one into the tiny airport we saw there. Very good modern Greek scenery is, of course, available for the whole country and all its islands, but I've only enhanced the Athens area a little for 1959.

So, going back 40 years from the Roggeveen holiday on Skopelos (we took a hydofoil from Airport Island), we're back with Vincent & the Carters at Athens Hellinikon:

Turned around on the runway and approaching the terminal. Incidentally, I landed at this airport in 1974 (aged 14 and my first ever visit to Greece) and couldn't help noticing the machine gun nests that lined the side of the runway! They were unmanned at the time, but as there was a war going on in Cyprus and they'd just had a revolution in Greece, then it wasn't really surprising, was it?

A fine exotic mixture of AI planes here. An Ethiopian:

I believe that is a DC-6 with three-bladed props (Viscounts have 4-bladed) - learning from the Master, TG of Cal Classics! Here's an eclectic array:

An Olympic DC-3, that is a BEA Viscount, and there is a TWA Boeing 707-120, which we're (deliberately) going to park beside. The unhelpful Ground Control wanted me to go somewhere boring, and as they can't be bothered with helpful landing technology, I can't be bothered with them. Besides, the Carters are quite elderly, can't see why they should have to walk miles or sit in a sweaty bus.

A better view of the Greek and the Brit. Although Olympic was (and remains) the national carrier of Greece, it also belonged to Aristotle Onassis who had taken over the old national airline, TAE in 1957. It was re-nationalized in 1975. Sadly, they had stopped using DC-3s for internal flights when young Ralf arrived the year before (I think in a BOAC VC-10. No diary that year!), though I saw plenty of shabby private freight ones shuffling about.

Here's a better shot of the TWA 707. I noticed that the stewardess (who would have called herself a hostess) whom Don Draper easily got off with at the start of Season 3 of Mad Men, was with TWA. That was on a flight from Idlewild to Baltimore - no doubt Tom can tell us if such a route was possible with them in 1963, the year it's set. If TWA was still going, I doubt very much that the TV people could have made her such a tart!

(Come to think of it, knowing the way airlines operate in America, if TWA was still going, she'd probably still be working for them).

Flying in here from the north on the simulator has been almost as much fun as doing it in reality. Hope you've enjoyed it (so far) too.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Athens, Greece

Presumably the chancers, carpetbaggers & cowboys who founded Athens, Ontario, Athens, Alabamha, Athens, Georgia, Athens, New York, Athens, Ohio, Athens, Pennsylvania, Athens, Tennessee and Athens, Texas were all thinking of the one in Greece. The atlas says Athens, Greece - see Athina. Those Carters had some old friends, Nick and Sophia Poulas, who lived there, so they got to see Athina. This page from Mrs Carter's book shows all of them, and, I believe, a slightly mysterious young woman called Thelma, plus a boy called Tommy (who came on most of the trip with them, but weren't part of the KLM prize deal) on what she calls Mars Hill:

This is more often called the Hill of Ares (i.e. Mars in Greek, not Latin) and was the site of the Areopagus where her hero, St Paul, argued with the pagan Greek philosophers. Mrs Carter tells us:

When I get to heaven I have a few things in mind to talk over with Paul, and when we stopped on Mars Hill I looked over the country and thought of him. I hope to tell him someday that I stood where he did. Maybe he will understand women better after our conversation. Or could it be otherwise?

Her confidence that she will (a) get to heaven, and (b) get to have chats with its most important occupants suggests that, despite the vegetarianism, Seventh Day Adventists have got a good faith going for themselves.

We might as well have a look round the fs9 Athens in this rather cute Olympic Cessna I borrowed:

There with a British charter DC-3 from a carrier who are not to be confused with the somewhat better-known US Continental Airlines.

So here it is above the Acropolis, citadel of Ancient Athens. The big temple in the middle is the Parthenon which was dedicated to their patron goddess, Athene of course. She was the goddess of Wisdom, with a bit of War thrown in (it's always a good idea to keep those two together if possible). There are other temple ruins there to Theseus, founder of the city, Nike, goddess of trainers - no, Victory (also goes well with war), etc. I doubt if even FSX could do justice to the stunning appearance of the real thing from any angle. Mrs Carter was dragged round somewhat reluctantly, there being no evidence that St Paul bothered to go up to those abominable pagan places of worship!

In the picture below you can just make out Hellenikon Airport down near the Piraeus, harbour of Athens:

When I got back, found this Lufthansa Viscount that had just arrived there:

It's fun to make up conversations between Mrs Carter and St Paul:

"Saint Paul, is that crumbs in your beard again? You really do need a goody li'l wifey to look after you, you old Evangelist you."

"Mrs Carter! I keep telling you, women are an abomination! You do not understand the simplest theological argument! You are worse than the Epicureans and Stoics; at least they had the philosophical grounding..."

"Oh, Saint Paul, quit your constant holy babble and try these Texan hominy grits; but no crumbs, mind."

 

[Wild Bill Kelso]

Ralf, I've been enjoying your trips for a long time now!
Please let me take your recent visit at my hometown as opportunity to say a big "Thank you!" for your splendid travel report.

Was glad to see Lufthansa's Convair Alfa Tango (the 'tragic-fated' one...) too - but I wondered what happened to its engine nacelles?
They weren't supposed to appear this grey&dull... Does any of my four Lufthansa Convairs look this way?

Groeten,
Markus.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Grüßen Markus! Thanks for the kind message - I'll have to check, but think that's how all the nacelles appeared, though the download was fine as far as I can remember. It flew beautifully, but we were banned from entering Tempelhof, as you'll recall. If anyone else has the Lufthansa CV-440s perhaps they could check theirs?

Map of the next stage, LGAT - OBLA:

This is Khaldeh Airport (as it was then sometimes called) though most people are perfectly happy with Beirut - and in fact the city of Beirut is effectively synonymous with the whole country, The Lebanon. Readers of earlier Roggeveen ramblings will know that we have been here before and that the Gersch/Gibson version is another spotters' paradise - now with added Traffic Tools!

These big aeroplanes were leaving Athens just before us:

Note that labels have been improved, so we get more info about the AI traffic which can be useful.

You can now see at a glance where they're headed, in this case we & the Carters will also, eventually, be visiting both of those airports. The Aussie is going down to Egypt and the Springbok is off to Italy. Here's another notable departure at that time...

...from the French TAI, two of whose planes we saw behaving suspiciously in South East Asia (Bangkok I think) during last year's BOAC Round the World flight. God alone knows what the French are up to!

Anyway, it was our turn to go:

Charlene can say goodbye to the Isle of Greece...I mean, does she even know that there's a mainland to Greece too? If I ever meet her (which may well happen as I'm definitely reviving her career here), then I'm going to ask Ms Charlene to draw a map of the Mediterranean as she imagines it.

We climb away and circle round from our north westerly takeoff to fly southeast...

There's the Frenchman off to LFPO, Paris Orly, apparently trying to avoid radar on the way (or trying to eye up girls on the beach? Maybe both).

A last view of Athens before we head out to sea. More Isles to come, Charlene...