New travel series on Iraq

Back from the dead? Well, not really. I still get a fair number of hits on some of the posts here but I don't have any immediate plans to revive this blog. I did want to mention that I've started a new series for Gadling, which is about traveling in Iraq. I spent 17 days in the country last month and I'm writing a long series about my intense yet mostly positive experiences there. It's called Destination: Iraq. Check it out!

And if you do want to read a blog by yours truly, check out my Civil War blog.

Traveling through Africa with Border Jumpers

A very cool blog contacted me last week. It's called Border Jumpers and it's pretty much what it says on the tin. Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg are on a mission to visit nearly every country in Africa, writing about their experiences with a special focus on community groups, NGOs, and local people. Sounds a bit like the Africa Heartbeat project I've covered here before.

They started in Addis Ababa last year and so far have made it to an impressive list of nations. They've talked with conservationist farmers in Ghana and written about using traditional crops to fight climate change in Zimbabwe. These are just two of the dozens of projects they've covered.

As I discovered on my recent trip through Ethiopia and Somaliland, Africa thrusts beauty and poverty at you simultaneously. Just look at the above photo, courtesy of Border Jumpers, of a palm oil processing center. It's little more than a bunch of grotty drums and a lot of hot steam in an already hot climate. Yet the woman standing in front radiates grace, beauty, and pride.

Border Jumpers, Africa Heartbeat, and I are headed the same direction with our writing. We're experienced travelers who have learned that the world is not the big, scary place TV tells us it is. It's big alright, but filled with intelligent, kind people doing all sorts of interesting things. The single most important thing a travel writer can do is communicate that simple truth to as many people as possible. So check out those sites for some uplifting reading, and some facts about Africa the mainstream media don't bother to cover.

Balloons and helicopters at Spain's Air Museum

Welcome to my fourth installment about the Museo del Aire in Madrid. First we're going a bit retro with an artist's reconstruction of a daring attempt at flight in 1793. Spanish inventor Diego Marín Aguilera decided it would be fun to make a pair of flapping wings complete with bird feathers and jump off the top of a castle. He did his calculations correctly and managed to make it 360 meters before landing. Well, actually he crashed, but as the old pilot's saying goes, "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing" and Aguilera walked away with only a few bruises. It's doubtful that his flapping did much good; he had really developed a decent glider. Not bad for someone who herded sheep for a living. Unfortunately the ignorant peasants he lived with thought he was a heretic and burnt his contraption before he got to improve it.

Here's a diorama of the Spanish balloon brigade. There wasn't any information on this in the display, but it appears from the uniforms to be a reconstruction of the late nineteenth century. Most European powers had balloon brigades by then because balloons had proved useful in the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. If anyone has more information about these guys I'd love to hear about it.
Here's the product of another Spanish inventor, Juan de la Cierva. He developed the first stable autogyro, the predecessor to the helicopter, in 1923. That helicopter was called the C4 prototype, and the machine pictured above is a replica of a C6. Some improvements had been made but as you can see, it still looks very much like an airplane. None of the earlier autogyros flew very far or very well, but the C6 was able to make a distance of seven miles, proving that this alternative to the airplane had potential. The flight left from Cuatro Vientos (Four Winds) airfield outside of Madrid, next to where the Museo del Aire stands today. The C6 is nine meters long, weighs 900 kilos, and has a maximum velocity of 100km/hr.
I had to take this photo because my son has a helicopter much like this, complete with spinning rotors and a retractable stretcher. He runs search-and-rescue operations in our living room all the time. This is a Sikorsky-Westland S-55, an American helicopter introduced in 1949 and one of the first truly viable helicopters for regular use. Compare it with the C6 above and you can see how much progress aviation engineers made in 26 years. It has a maximum velocity of 180 km/hr, is 12.71 meters long, and 4.03 meters high.
I love retro Soviet stuff, although the Stalin bus in St. Petersburg is going too far. This Mil Mi-2 Hoplite is just the ticket, incorporating drab green Soviet chic with a timeless hammer-and-sickle motif. Introduced as a military helicopter in 1965, it is still in wide use today for basic transport, forestry, air ambulance, and fire protection missions. Some developing countries, notably North Korea, still use these for military purposes.

Coming up tomorrow: biplanes!

The strange little airplane that became a movie star

Does this little plane look familiar? Perhaps it would look more familiar all banged up and flying over the Australian outback with Mel Gibson in it? That's right, it featured in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome!

Introducing the Transavia PL-12 Airtruk, which in the first scene of the movie flies down out of the skies to attack Max as he's driving his disabled police car across the desert with the help of a team of camels. Jedediah the Pilot, played by Bruce Spence, knocks Max off the top of the car and steals the vehicle. Later in the movie Jedediah and Max team up. The pilot flies a group of kids to safety with Tina Turner and a bunch of leather daddies in hot pursuit. Max clears the way for them in a cool fight scene but is left behind, doomed to be the eternal outsider.

The PL-12 was introduced by the Australian company Transavia in 1966 for bush work such as search and rescue, ambulance duty, and agriculture and is a compact, highly maneuverable vehicle perfect for post-apocalyptic hijinks. It has a maximum speed of 195 km/hr, is 6.35 meters long, 2.79 meters high, with a wingspan of 11.98 meters.

I've heard rumors that they're making another in the Mad Max series. I hope that's true, and I hope we get to see Jedediah the Pilot make a reappearance. He was always my favorite character. Hey Bruce Spence, if you happen to be googling yourself (no shame there, I do it all the time) could you tell us your memories of working with this cool plane?

Coming up tomorrow: helicopters and balloons!

Training the Luftwaffe in peacetime

During the Spanish Civil War and World War Two, the Luftwaffe was the most feared air force in the world, but it came from very humble beginnings. After the Germans lost World War One, the Treaty of Versailles made them give up their air force. The rest of Europe didn't want any more Red Barons flying around!

Once Hitler came to power in 1933 he set about rebuilding Germany's military might. He wanted a strong air force, but couldn't have any planes and in the early years he was not yet powerful enough to defy the rest of Europe. So he ordered a fleet of these gliders to train his pilots.
It's called the Aisa/Schneider SG-38 Schulgleiter ("training glider") and it trained a whole generation of German pilots on the basics of flight. They were considered sports equipment and therefore didn't fall under the ban of the Treaty of Versailles. This was a common trick of the early Third Reich, which had lots of "sports clubs" and "sports equipment" to train its young men for the next round of slaughter and ruin.
Still, it's a pretty cool glider, even if it was used for bad purposes. It would take a fair amount of guts to go aloft in one of these! For those techies out there, it's 6.28 meters long, 2.43 meters high, and has a wingspan of 10.41 meters. It weighs 95.12 kilos empty. Maximum safe speed is 30 km/hr but one brave pilot got it up to 110 km/hr. The sign didn't say who that was but I'm betting he gave the Royal Air Force a bit of trouble.

These photos were taken at the Air Museum in Madrid, Spain. I've already posted some other photos from the Museo del Aire and will be posting every day this week, so tune in for some cool aircraft.

Tomorrow: The strange little airplane that became a movie star!

The Madrid Air Museum

Last weekend the family and I visited Madrid's Museo del Aire. We were impressed by its collection of more than a hundred airplanes and helicopters, along with extensive displays of equipment, motors, etc. Needless to say, my four-year-old son loved this place. One of the curators told us it's the fifth biggest air museum in the world. I'm not sure who measures these things, but I'm willing to believe it. We took so many pictures that I'll be posting on the museum every day this week. So. . .on to the good stuff!

The cool retro jet pictured above is an F-86 Sabre and one of my favorites. Introduced into the U.S. Air Force in 1947 and serving with distinction in the Korean War, Spain bought 270 of them in 1955. It had a maximum speed of 1070 km/hr and this particular example was armed with six M2 Browning 12.7mm machine guns, a 20mm canon, and 24 MK4 "Mighty Mouse" air-to-air rockets.
Here's a front view of a Saab AJ-37 Viggen "Thunderbolt". This Swedish plane was at the forefront of design when introduced in 1971. It could land with just 500 meters of airstrip thanks to strong landing gear and the ability to reverse the stream of the nozzle. It had a maximum velocity of 2124 km/hr. Armaments included a 30mm cannon, 2 Maverick and 4 Sidewinder missiles, and 24 Bofors rockets.
The French Mirage III-E served in the Spanish Air Force from 1970-92. While Spain never used them in combat, other countries used them effectively in the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the Falklands War. It had a maximum velocity of 2,350 km/hr and carried two 30mm cannons, 900 kg of bombs, one Matra R-530 and two Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.
Besides aircraft, the museum has lots of other air-related machinery, like this searchlight dating to 1915. It saw service in the German army in the First World War and in the Spanish Civil War to protect a hydroplane base in Majorca.

Tomorrow: How the Germans trained the Luftwaffe without breaking the Treaty of Versailles, which said they couldn't have an air force!

The travel bug that just won't die

Sorry for the long silence, but if you're a regular reader of this blog or any of my other social media outlets like Facebook or Twitter, you know I've been in Ethiopia and Somaliland for the past two months. Besides writing, my greatest love is travel. I previously posted about my travel year of 2009, which included a lot of shuttling back and forth between Spain, England, and Missouri, plus a hike across England along Hadrian's Wall and a short trip to Holland. Fun stuff, but nothing truly adventurous.

This year started well with some adventure travel. Thanks to two of my publishers, I had the money to go to the Horn of Africa, a place I've always dreamed of visiting. When I was ten I read a National Geographic article about the monastery at Debre Damo, a medieval Ethiopian monastery on top of a cliff. The only way to get there is to climb up a dodgy-looking leather rope. I thought that was the coolest thing ever and thirty years later I finally got to do it!

Almudena joined me for the first three weeks and we celebrated our tenth anniversary in Ethiopia. We did the popular historic northern loop, taking in ancient sites such as the monasteries on Lake Tana, Gondar, Axum, and Lalibela. Then she went home and I headed east to the medieval walled city of Harar and further on to Somaliland, an unrecognized state that comprises the northern third of what used to be Somalia. It was cool to visit "Somalia" and find it peaceful and friendly, but my favorite place by far was Harar. There's a special feel to walled cities that I've noticed in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Segovia. They comprise their own separate worlds, and their inhabitants are very aware of their history and culture.

So is my travel bug satiated? On the contrary, it's just woken up! I'm off to Italy in May, and hopefully The Gambia this autumn. Also, I'm going to try to convince my publishers to send me back to Ethiopia next year. I made lots of friends in Harar and I'd like to visit soon.

I'm writing a series of travel articles about Ethiopia for Gadling, and when that's done in about a month I'll do a series on Somaliland. Plus I intend to get back to blogging here on a regular basis. The Internet connection in Ethiopia was terrible. Most of the country was on dialup! Stay tuned.

Back to a different Oxford

I spent most of last week in The Netherlands doing some research for my next book and writing articles for Gadling. I had a great time and managed to see the grand opening of the Amsterdam branch of the Hermitage. I'll be posting more articles on Gadling next week, including a feature on Delft and one on Dutch castles.

Now I'm back in Oxford, but it's not the same as when I left. Two weeks ago the students were in the throes of exams. Now they're finished and most have left, to be replaced by ever-increasing hordes of tourists. I'll miss not having the students around; they are a big part of the atmosphere in any university town, and now that term has ended there will be fewer functions at the university. The best lecture I saw was by archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson about his Stonehenge Riverside Project. There won't be any more of those until September. Now I'll have to deal with big crowds of people walking agonizingly slowly through the center of town.

So far it hasn't been so bad. I suspect the economic downturn has slowed things down. Amsterdam had noticeably fewer people than when I last visited, and my traveling companion who was there last November said it was even slower than before, strange considering he was last there in winter and now it's summer. Maybe bad economic times will give me some respite from the tourist hordes this summer.