In what plane did you first fly?

galgot

galgot

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The End Of a Era: Boeing 747 *1969-2020† thread gives me this topic idea.
In what plane did you first you flew ? Or any the significant ones , being pilot or passenger .
First time I flew was in dec 1974 going from Paris to Fez (Morocco) with mother and brother to rejoin my father posted as teacher there.
And luckily he had a camera :
Caravelle-F-BJTO-74-01.jpg Caravelle-F-BJTO-74-02.jpg
I’m the kid waving on the tarmac behind the Caravelle rear stairs .
Since I’ve found that picture, I’ve checked a bit about that Caravelle F-BJTO.
Turns out she was Caravelle Type III N°148, christened "Pays Basque", and the nose still exist preserved at Le Bourget Museum reserves ! How cool is that.
http://www.pyperpote.tonsite.biz/li...0-caravelle-type-iii-n-148-f-bjto-pays-basqueHer story line on that page is strange tho, cause my picts cleary show she was still flying for Air France in 1974…
Also, I have no memories of the flight… apart from these picts.
Your turn.
 
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February 2004. Iberia MD-87 or -88 in San Sebastian - Basque country. Must have been one among these

https://www.iberia.com/fr/fr/flotte/avions-historiques/
What I clearly remember is the stair just below the tail, with the APU thundering above our heads. Even as an aviation buff, I found that way of accessing an airliner a little dumb. Flew to Madrid and then to Malaga. Spend 5 months there as ERASMUS student, an experience that changed my life for the best.

Crap, wasn't my first flight. Just my first airliner flight.

My first flight was onboard an Alouette II. Later flew aboard a DR-400.

Both times, with pilots which also happened to be neighbours in the tiny village of 300 souls where I grew up (two former military pilots in such a backward place - how about that).

One of the two was (and still is, even downrated to Ultralight machines nowadays) a crazy daredevil who shook the DR-400 like a Stuka "to show you how they found their targets before diving on them" (he didn't dove).
 
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My first helicopter flight was in a Hughes 300 along with my dad and one brother (1968). We took off from the site of the former Soviet pavilion on the Expo '67 World's Fair grounds. They had completely flattened the Soviet site to make a helicopter landing pad.

A year later I talked a neighbor into taking me up in his recently restored Luscombe 8 Silvaire.
 
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RAF VC-10 to BAOR for my first posting in 1976 followed by a real Bear, Canada in 1977 in a C-130. That was a LOUD trip. It was a good year but somewhere in BATUS is a Chieftain MK V heading for the earths core. One of the salt flats swallowed it up overnight and last I heard it was 100' down and still going. I wonder what the future archeologist or visiting species will think if they dig THAT bolt of bits up.
 
Arjen said:
A glider, near Basle, with a view of the mountains on one side and a bend of the Rhine on the other. Looped the loop, met a buzzard on the way. Magic.
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Yeah gliding is magic. Stayed 5 hours once, the weather was so good even when i reached late afternoon, i couldn't think of landing. Took the guys at the club to call me "We are parking the machines in the hangar, it's 19h00 , now land !"
 
So - my first flight was LAX-to-DCA in a DC-7, American Airlines 1956. The continuation to PHL was in an AA DC-3. I flew alone. I was only 11 years old, but my best memory is how beautiful and kind the stewardesses were! Regards, Harry
 
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First BA Boeing 757, but the best was a Learjet 35, out of Bodo. I want one. Most entertaining - crosswind landing into Trondheim in a Do 228. Only time I've seen pilots hug each other after a landing - at the fourth attempt.

Chris
 
Dan Air Boeing 727 to Crete - I was about 8 or 9 I think, and my grandparents took me. Maybe 1982? Mainly memorable because we were seated near the rear only a row in front of the smoking seats, and I spent the entire trip engulfed in a haze of cigarette smoke.
 
CJGibson said:
First BA Boeing 757, but the best was a Learjet 35, out of Bodo. I want one. Most entertaining - crosswind landing into Trondheim in a Do 228. Only time I've seen pilots hug each other after a landing - at the fourth attempt.

Chris
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Where does 2 emergency landings, sequentially, same day, different airframe sit - after the second they offered a 3rd later flight.....I cut my losses...

BAe 146 from Gatwick to germany, very cold -10c, first flight, 'smoke' in the cockpit, back to Gatwick, bussed straight to another aircraft, exactly the same - caused by de-icing fluid in the air inlet.....SOP is RTB....
 
Another good flight, was back from GW1 - VC10 to Germany, everyone off - unless you wanted a free flight to UK, stayed on, got off at Brize - in desert combats, no UK money, rang my mate, he came and got me, 200 miles - still remember stopping on the M6 for a pee, he said what are you always looking for? I said best place to hide if a SCUD comes in.....
 
Summer 1983 in an Interflug Ilyushin Il-18 from Erfurt (ETEF) to Budapest-Ferihegy (LHBP).
Sitting at the level of the wings, the drinking glasses rotated wildly due to the vibrations of the Ivchenko engines.

On this occasion, another question: Is there any SPF user beyond the age of 50 who has never flown on an airplane?
 
First that I have a recollection of was a British Airways B737-200, got to visit the cockpit! The crew plied me with BA memorabilia to the point that I felt embarrassed about accepting it all :) I must have been about five?

Most remarkable equipment on a regular trip would probably be a Condor DC-10-30. Without that caveat, clearly the Lufthansa Ju-52!

Weirdest is an A330-200 between Réunion and Mauritius (a flight which takes all of 25 minutes). If you think an A330 for a scheduled 230km trip is a bit much, Air Austral frequently uses B777-300ERs on the same route - plane's longer than the flight distance FFS!
 
boxkite said:
Summer 1983 in an Interflug Ilyushin Il-18 from Erfurt (ETEF) to Budapest-Ferihegy (LHBP).
Sitting at the level of the wings, the drinking glasses rotated wildly due to the vibrations of the Ivchenko engines.

On this occasion, another question: Is there any SPF user beyond the age of 50 who has never flown on an airplane?
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About flying soviet time planes, I flew a Aeroflot Tu-154 in 1986 ( i think ?) so that was USSR time, from Nairobi to Sheremetievo, with stops at Karthoum and Cairo.
Food was excellent. Hostesses very pretty. Only thing is, the guy did a super fast descent at Sheremetievo, it almost blew my hears drums, super painful.
 
A Fokker F-27 from Berlin THF to Stuttgart, spring 1985.
The lady at the check-in counter, which then doubled as stewardess, had to make the sandwiches and the coffee,
too, and brought it to the plane. Very familial and overseeable. But it was lousy cold in that plane !
 
_Del_ said:
707 cross country, and I'm told I cried the entire way ;)
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For some unexplicable reason Paris La Reunion flights are only by night. Tell that to a 3 years old ! so he didn't slept and neither did the unfortunate passengers around.
And then...
...two hours before landing near Madagascar, sun through the windows and... the kid decided to sleep. Now.

Faites des gosses !!
 
Not mine but when I was a lowly graduate in the Flight Test Engineering office at Bristish Aerospace (as it was at the time) at Warton in late 1998, I worked for a charming old gent who had been recruited back out of retirement to do some analysis of some Jaguar flight testing that had previously been done by DERA in support of Herrick. Among his other tales of yore, he told me that the very first time he left the ground was in a Lightning flown by the then Chief Test Pilot....!
 
Raberto said:
Not mine but when I was a lowly graduate in the Flight Test Engineering office at Bristish Aerospace (as it was at the time) at Warton in late 1998, I worked for a charming old gent who had been recruited back out of retirement to do some analysis of some Jaguar flight testing that had previously been done by DERA in support of Herrick. Among his other tales of yore, he told me that the very first time he left the ground was in a Lightning flown by the then Chief Test Pilot....!
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Talk about a baptism by fire!
 
1946-Piper J-5, later many Piper, Stinson, Cessna, Beechcraft, Luscombe, Waco. Military-L-4, BT-13, SNJ, TV-2, C-45, P5M, T2J. H-13, H-34, most with 1st pilot or right hand seat time. Lot s of riding time in 30 or more transport types plus some gliders, Most recent, right seat Bonanza last year.
ArtieBob
 
National Airlines (NAL) Boeing 727-35 from JFK to TPA in 1978. We went to visit my father's friends, who had been transferred there from JFK by the airline (being transferred out of state was an annual worry for us as airline brats), and then on to Orlando for our first trip to Disney World.

Because my dad was an employee, I flew as a non-rev child with my family. As such, we were required to wear suits and flew stand-by. I soon learned flying stand-by anxiety by counting the people - and especially young kids dressed in suits (because by the late 1970's seemingly only airline employee's kids wore suits to fly) - wondering if we were going to make a flight or not. :)

Here's a photo of N4612 (c/n 18813/94) "Judy" at Atlanta in December 1972, posted by Rob Rindt on Flickr.
43290123111_9cdbe595d4_c.jpg
 
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The first aircraft in which I flew was probably a Handley Page Hermes.

I can't be sure about this. It was, at a guess, about midsummer 1952. We were flying as a family from London to Nairobi. I was four years old. We stopped several times along the route, and I think the total journey time amounted to 24 hours.

I'm guessing it was a Hermes – we almost certainly flew BOAC, and at that time, there were few long-distance airliners.

We returned to the UK twice by boat – Union Castle line. We finally returned after Uhuru, this time by a Bristol Britannia.

The first aircraft I ever was given the controls of was an Air Experience Chipmunk.
 
My first flightt was in a Blanik glider in 1968 at an airfield in the Chilterns arranged.by a workmate of.my fathers..I sat forward of the pilot and the views were amazing.
My first airliner flight was a Lufthansa 737 to Cologne.Bonn in Summer 1980 paid for by my employers.
 
galgot said:
The End Of a Era: Boeing 747 *1969-2020† thread gives me this topic idea.
In what plane did you first you flew ? Or any the significant ones , being pilot or passenger .
First time I flew was in dec 1974 going from Paris to Fez (Morocco) with mother and brother to rejoin my father posted as teacher there.
And luckily he had a camera :
View attachment 638558 View attachment 638557
I’m the kid waving on the tarmac behind the Caravelle rear stairs .
Since I’ve found that picture, I’ve checked a bit about that Caravelle F-BJTO.
Turns out she was Caravelle Type III N°148, christened "Pays Basque", and the nose still exist preserved at Le Bourget Museum reserves ! How cool is that.
http://www.pyperpote.tonsite.biz/li...0-caravelle-type-iii-n-148-f-bjto-pays-basqueHer story line on that page is strange tho, cause my picts cleary show she was still flying for Air France in 1974…
Also, I have no memories of the flight… apart from these picts.
Your turn.
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Dinky.Toys made this just for you.
 

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snark said:
So - my first flight was LAX-to-DCA in a DC-7, American Airlines 1956. The continuation to LaGuardia was in an AA DC-3. I flew alone. I was only 11 years old, but my best memory is how beautiful and kind the stewardesses were! Regards, Harry
Click to expand...
Nothing like a few negative G to enlighten your late childhood... ;)
 
First flight was a Britannia 737 from Luton to Ibiza as a kid i think, including a trip to the cockpit.

First small plane was the good old chipmunk as a Air Cadet, including aero's.

VC-10 flight that ended as an emergency landing due to smoke in the cockpit, little bit scary!

I was really lucky and got to fly in a KC-135 air-air refuelling F3 tornados (the KC had a basket attached on the boom) fantastic experience watching the tonkas that close.

Being winched in and out of a SAR Sea King was rather fab as well, thanks to a mate who was a winch op.

My last flight and daughters first was a treat / trip in a DH Rapid out of Duxford a couple of years ago.

Wife got to fly in a Hunter years ago, low level over Scotland, lucky girl.
 
I was late to it, fairly certain my first flight was in the early 2000s (by which time I'd be approaching 40) in an ASK21 glider out of Long Mynd in Shropshire with the Midland Gliding Club on a week-long gliding course a bunch of us from work decided to take. I didn't make much progress as flying was so new an experience I just wanted to stick my nose against the windscreen and watch the world go by. We did it again the next year, but rather than Long Mynd went to Seyne Les Alpes in France, so did all our flights ridge-running along bits of the Alpes-Maritime. Instructor, pointing just a few feet off the wingtip: "Les chevres, er, goats!". Fun, but bumpy. I think I was the only one of the group who didn't smack his head off the top of the canopy. I flew back via Munich and we took off in a thunderstorm. All the other passengers were screaming, I was "Meh, felt worse!"
 
The Army Air Corps flew a number of rotary types for IS missions and would delight at flying very low level with noob's. How Low? "Can anyone back there see a road sign they recognise"? I swear some of the HGV drivers in the area were a bit more jumpy than you might find elsewhere. Not that I blame them much.
 

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