My heart broke when I saw the update on the Royal Air force Aerobatic Team website. Until the last, I’d hoped that Flight Lieutenant Egging had managed to eject safely. And then the RED 4 Messages of Condolence page appeared.

It is with sadness that the MOD must confirm the death of Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging of the Royal Air Force Aerobatics Team (The Red Arrows).

Flight Lieutenant Egging was killed when his Hawk T1 aircraft – Red 4 – crashed around 1km South East of Bournemouth Airport at 1350 on Saturday 20 August 2011.

The accident is being investigated and although rumours abound, there is yet no hard information as to what went wrong.

Yesterday in the The Red Arrows Team News, the RAF announced that the Red Arrows would fly back to RAF Scrampton today. However, this morning there was rain and a low cloud base at RAF Scampton and so the flight was cancelled in hopes of better weather tomorrow. A nice reminder that it happens even to the best pilots.

The team will be resume training next week after their return to Scramptom. The Red Arrows have eight-man displays already in their repetoire, in order to go on in case a pilot is unable to fly, so they may resume yet their public display schedule.

Here’s the best of the videos I found of the Red Arrows display at the Quebec International Airshow last year:

Look at them there. They are flying six feet apart. I won’t even get that close to another plane on the ground when I’m trying to park on the apron!

The RAF explain how the Red Arrows were established on their Team History page

The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of Royal Air Force jet aerobatic display teams. By the mid-60s almost every Flying Training School, and several operational squadrons, had their own teams. So much time, effort and money was being expended on these non-established tasks that the Royal Air Force eventually decided to disband them all and form a single, full-time professional team.

Thus, in 1964, the Red Pelicans flying six Jet Provost T Mk 4s became the first team to represent the Royal Air Force as a whole. In that same year a team of five yellow Folland Gnat jet trainers, known as the Yellowjacks, was formed at No 4 Flying Training School at Royal Air Force Valley in north Wales, led by Flight Lieutenant Lee Jones. The following year Jones was posted to the Central Flying School (CFS) to form the Red Arrows. The Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team (RAFAT), the formal name of the Red Arrows, began life at RAF Fairford in Glouces­tershire, then a satellite of CFS. Initially there were seven display pilots and ten Gnat jet trainers.

The name ‘Red Arrows’ was chosen to combine the appeal and expertise of two earlier teams, the famous Black Arrows and the Red Pelicans.

So how do you become a Red Arrow display pilot?

You must have a minimum of 1,500 flying hours and have completed a frontline tour and be assessed as above average in your flying role. From those who fulfill these qualifications, a shortlist of nine applicants is created. They go through a “selection week” including flying tests, interviews and peer assessments. If you are selected, you do a three-year tour before returning to your Royal Air Force duties.

I don’t fit the minimum requirements for the RAF under any circumstances but … well, a girl can dream, can’t she?

And finally, a gallery of stunning Red Arrow images that made me stop and stare (click through the thumbnails to view full-size or right-click to open in a new window):

All images are Crown copyright and taken from the Royal Airforce Press Collection. You can see more imagery of the Red Arrows on the Multimedia page.

This video is of a P-51D Mustang Ferocious Frankie owned by the Old Flying Machine Company, who fly aerobatic displays with the plane (and duos with a Spitfire) at airshows all over the the US. Ferocious Frankie is a 1944 Mustang with a 1760 horsepower Merlin engine and a maximum speed of 505mph. Their website includes the aircraft history:

The P-51 was the most successful long-range fighter escort of World War II, but it was not an instant success. Designed for the British in only 120 days to meet their requirement to purchase more fighters, the first Mustangs were built with Allison engines; while remarkable at low altitudes, these variants were considered under-powered and disappointing at higher altitudes. Happily, in late 1942 the aircraft was transformed when, in the UK, Rolls Royce Merlin engines were tested in place of the Allison. The Merlin, as used in the Spitfire, was then license-built by Packard in the USA and in 1943 was installed in the P-51B & C models. This near perfect marriage of engine and platform made the 1944 P-51D, with its bubble canopy and six-guns, one of the most iconic and potent fighters of all time.

The P-51D’s range was an incredible 2,055m (3,327km), thanks to its huge fuel capacity of 1,000 litres internally and 815 litres in drop tanks. Equally impressive was a level maximum speed of 437mph (703kph) at 25,000 feet, a max diving speed of 505mph (818kph) and a service ceiling of 41,900 feet (12,800m).

The video is excellently shot but it was this comment by sjlanca that really touched me:

Imagine being twenty one years old and just off the farm from Central Illinois.

Your Dad just retired the horses from plowing the fields, because he just bought his first steel wheeled tractor. You leave home for the first time, having never traveled more than 45 miles from the farm, because the government hired, trained, and paid you to drive one of these. That was my Dad, and he is something special.

He later wrote that his father, 88 years old, piloted missions over Europe.

Dad doesn’t talk much about his experiences anymore, but I remember some of the stories from when I was younger. Mom says he still has nightmares. Thank you to all the veterans for their service.

It brought a personal touch to this video of a gorgeous old aircraft.

For more information on Ferocious Frankie, visit the website at http://www.ferociousfrankie.com

Alistair Mayer is a brilliant science fiction writer and all around nice guy whose stories regularly grace the pages of Analog magazine. He shared this story from his flying days in Canada and kindly allowed me to share it with you here as a part of my I learned from that series. You can find out more about him on Alastair Mayer’s T-Space.

There were a bunch of us that regularly hung out at the local flying club, we’d gone through the same ground school together and were still pretty new pilots. We sometimes did some pretty stupid things. One guy, Terry, once came back with a small tree branch in his landing gear.

Anyway, one fine Saturday afternoon I was taking one of the planes out for some practise and invited Terry along. This was near a small town in southern Ontario, lots of farmland. I’d been practising approaches and — not sure whose idea it was, probably both of us — decided to try a soft-field landing on a large grassy field. The landing was no problem — except that as we rolled out I realized that there was a slight slope to the field and where we were headed was getting softer and muddier from the rain we’d had a day earlier. I was worried about getting stuck, so made a (in hindsight, ill-considered) decision to just turn around and take off before I lost more speed.

So, there we are, rolling along on a very soft, grassy field, slightly up-slope, trying to get flying speed. There are trees at the end of the field — not a problem on landing, potentially a serious problem trying to take off with the drag of the soft field and wet grass slowing us down. But there’s a nice wide gap in the trees, and I’ve almost got flying speed. Terry is starting to look nervous. Then I see the wire fence across the end of the field, between the gap in the trees. The kind that probably eats landing gear for breakfast. Crap.

Actually at that point I was pretty confident I had the airspeed to lift and clear the fence and maybe even the trees (but there was room to go between them), but Terry is getting really nervous. Just to bug him, I took one hand off the controls and crossed myself (I’m neither Catholic nor particularly religious), then pulled back and cleared the end of the field.

I’ll say one thing — I never heard any more stories of Terry coming back with leaves in his landing gear after that.

Bio: Alastair Mayer was born in England, raised in Canada and now lives in Colorado. He grew up reading science fiction, and got serious about writing it a couple of years ago. He builds on a good base: he majored in life sciences and computers in college, has sky-dived, earned his pilot’s licence and done hundreds of scuba dives, served in the reserves and been a member of the L5 Society, National Space Society, Planetary Society, and probably a few other things he doesn’t remember right now.

The video above (which has no sound) was filmed by Dr Lora Little in the Bahamas. She said the scene was eerie as they snorkelled the site, moving fast from spot to spot to collect as much information as possible. The video intrigued me and I saw it was hosted on APmagazine. Browsing through their updates, I found out more: the story behind their exploration and this aircraft is amazing. I got in touch to ask if I could share the story on my blog and and the Littles were kind enough to answer my questions as well as allow me to host the video.

Dr Greg Little and Dr Lora Little have been exploring the waters of the Bahamas, searching dark, underwater formations they’ve located in the Bermuda Triangle. These formations show as dark spots in aerial surveys and the Littles have found over one hundred of them.

The area is famed as being the site of the lost city of Atlantis and although the Littles have not found anything to link to the legends, they believe they have seen archaeological evidence of “an unknown, somewhat sophisticated maritime culture operating in the Bahamas during ancient times.” The primary focus of their expedition has been to find evidence of this maritime culture.

Bermuda Triangle Yields Secrets

One of the largest and most interesting forms visited on the Great Bahama Bank was approximately 35 miles off Andros lying in 20 feet of water. Taking the shape of a dark “eye” with white sand outlining it, the center of the formation showed a round white spot. From the air, it is a stunning view and the formation is nearly 500-feet long. In the white center spot of the formation we found a plane, turned upside down. The plane was completely buried under the sand, but a retractable front landing gear was sticking out from the bottom. It was removed and brought to the surface by Eslie Brown.

Greg and Lora Little explored over a hundred dark spots in the Bermuda Triangle and began to publish details of the aircraft ion hopes of identifying them. In December 2009, they found the remains of a DC-3 which appears to be NC-16002, one of the most talked about mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. (Read the detail on Wikipedia: NC16002 disappearance). The DC-3 discovery was featured on National Geographic last year in the episode, The Truth Behind the Bermuda Triangle and the History Channel has featured the Littles finding several aircraft on MysteryQuest: The Devil’s Triangle.

In June 2011, Dr Greg Little posted about another plane that they had discovered: a twin engine that they’d discovered during a dive 100 miles south of Bimini. He asked for help identifying the aircraft.

Bimini June 2011

The pilot’s headphones and microphone piece were removed from the cockpit. There was other cargo in the plane. It seems unlikely that there could have been any survivors, even if they survived the actual crash. The location is simply too far from any land. The photo of the plane is shown below and we would like any pilot or mechanic’s opinion as to the make of the aircraft. My father, a pilot and WW-II Naval air veteran believes it may be a large Beech. It looks like a large Piper to me.

One of the engines had its plate removed. Our hope is that someone can run down the model and engine number and eventually find the specific plane the engine was installed on.

Lora and Greg Little were able to find the mechanic who installed the engine. They removed the engine serial number plates from the aircraft and contacted the manufacturer, AVCO Lycoming in Williamsport, PA. A technician there was able to use the serial number to track the engine: including the company in Texas which received it in 1970. Greg found a company of the same name and phoned them. They no longer did aircraft work and the records had long since been destroyed, but one of the “older” employees knew a mechanic, now retired, who had worked for the company in 1970. They managed to get in touch with the mechanic within a week.

He was in his mid-80′s and had a recent stroke. But he remembered the plane and immediately said it was a Beech Queen Air. The family was actually surprised and happy that he remembered it so well, but he could not remember the name of the owner nor the plane’s N-number. In addition, all of the written records the mechanic had were long gone.

With this information, they were able to confirm that the engine was installed in 1970 in Texas. The aircraft has now been postively identified as a Beechcraft Queen Air (note: always listen to your father).

With this information, they have managed to narrow down the aircraft to two possibilities:

Looking Inside A Plane July 2011

The most likely identity of the aircraft is a plane that is on the “semi-official” list of planes lost in the Bermuda Triangle compiled by Gian Quasar, whose website http://www.bermuda-triangle.org is considered to be the most authoritative information source on the subject. After getting information on the “lost” plane, a lot of research led to the family of the long-lost pilot of the plane. I have now spoken to the father of the pilot who disappeared as well as two other family members and had contacts with others who were involved. Not knowing what to expect in the initial contact I was pleased that the plane’s possible discovery was a relief to them. This has turned out to be one of the most interesting and intriguing stories I have ever been involved with.

[...]

In the unlikely event that this is NOT the above mentioned plane, then another, perhaps even more baffling and mysterious disappearance has been solved. Oddly, this information came as a complete surprise to us in an email from a Coast-to-Coast listener who found our request on the popular radio show’s website http://coasttocoastam.com. This involves the inexplicable disappearance of a young pilot some decades ago. While this plane is not on the Bermuda Triangle list, oddly we found (online) official requests from law enforcement agencies, which had placed the disappearance in a closed case file that requested further information from the public.

Greg told me that they are definitely returning to the Bahamas this month with a goal to solve the mystery once and for all. They will publish an update on APmagazine as soon as they get back, around the 2nd of September. I can’t wait to hear more!