Maintainers work on the left wingtip of a Vietnam War-era DHC-4 Caribou, operated by Flightworks Inc. at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, May 11, 2012. The charter aircraft drops supplies by parachute to special forces and other clandestine units deployed in hard-to-reach locations around Afghanistan, according to Air Force and Army officials at Bagram. Visible in the foreground are portions of the right wing and tail of an AC-130 gunship. (AFA staff photo by John. A. Tirpak)
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Caribou in Afghanistan
Photo-- Turbo-Caribou sighting; Afghanistan.
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8 comments:
Any way you look at it the de Havilland STOL's shares a bright star here in Norway.
/Energo
Hi Energo:
Why is that? Could you shed a bit of light on this?
VR,
Horde
Hope the asbestos and structural problems as espoused by Angus and Joel leading to their premature retirement do not lead to any problems during their operations.
And there are some fairly high ranges and moutains.
What asbestos would that be?
There is no asbestos in the Turbo Caribou and, IIRC, the only asbestos that was originally in the Caribou was in the exhaust manifold gaskets of the R2000 engine, similar to the millions upon million car engines produced over the period.
Sounds like Angus and the Minister were, once again, misled and chose to believe the pile of "a total indifference to what is real" they were being fed.
Exactly.
Retired on a lie.
I also believe that the termninolgy was "riddled " with asbestos.
In all my years doing work for WorkCover, and handling all the asbestos cases, I can not remember handling a case regarding Aircraft of Automoblies.
I also worked for Comcare, however do not remember any asbestos claims regarding aircraft.
The overwhelming number of cases were related to building products and their production.
A short tale of interest to complement Eric's beaut video clip, which by the way depicts very good weather for PNG/Irian Jaya operating environs.
We had been operating RAAF Iroquois, either in the Wewak or Lake Kopiago area, perhaps for Pacific Islands Regiment support, and diverted to Menyamya in the Southern Highlands en route Port Moresby to uplift a small bulldozer to a higher mission station at Kanabea in cannibal country.
Our Delta model was lower-powered than the Hotel model Huey and we could only carry sufficient fuel for a return trip between PZ/LZ to enable transportation of the heavy bulldozer components internally in the cabin as performance was too limited for external sling loading. All loads were so heavy that the aircraft had to be flown right to ground level as there was insufficient power available to properly hover at the higher LZ altitude. So; the bulldozer blade, which protruded either side of the cabin was used as a ramp at the LZ for sliding gearboxes, engine, etcetera out of the aircraft with maybe 50 or so little cannibals pulling like mad on ropes and the aircrew in the cabin pulling opposite to prevent disaster.
Eventually, we managed to reposition all bulldozer components and there was much singing and dancing from the locals; but we then got weathered in and forced to stay overnight at the mission. Building an airstrip at Kanabea had been a long-held dream of Father Dechon (spelling?), a French Priest at Lae, so the Priest then based at the mission dragged out bottles of wine and spirits to celebrate fly-in of the bulldozer.
Sometime later, Father Dechon and others were being flown in by Pilatus Porter for the official opening of the 1,000 feet airstrip which ended at a near vertical drop of several hundred feet. The Porter hit just short of the threshhold and all on board were killed. A very sad end to a dream.
Many sorries. I should have put my last on the STOL Ops - PNG post.
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