Aviation poetry, thoughts and more

This is a product of the moment when I asked myself what I have learned during a rough time. I eventually realised that the answers that I was looking for was hidden somewhere in me. Helped by looking at the many things in my room I luckily found out what I want my future to be. 

  I got inspired by Taylor Swift  and her explanation of her song epiphany. In a Disney+ special (Folklore: The long pond studio session) she talks about this song. She mentions her grandfather fought in the second world war and that he was a participant in the fight over guadalcanal. It was probably the biggest fight he was in but never talked about it. I realised that refusing to talk about the biggest battles is something we all do. Sure not everyone has gone to war but everyone sooner or later has some sort of battle to fight. A battle that you will survive but never want to speak about.

It started all out as a haiku for the Kawasaki C‑2 but since it was so generic I turned it into a haiku about riding the wind or better said flying. Eventualy I decided to use a photo of a glider.  

  *Note: this was writen before the war on Ukraine* Europe, birthplace of many wonderful helicopter designs. They have made mainly transport helicopters and while their light and medium sized helicopters are selling well, there is one type they made once and never again. I'm ofcourse talking about the heavy helicopter class wich contains helicopters like the Mil Mi-26 and Boeing CH-47 but also one from France called the Aérospatiale SA 321 Super Frelon. The Super Frelon is the only heavy helicopter made in Europe, as long as you don't consider Russia as part of Europe. But now I'm here to say that France, along with some other European friends, should start making a new heavy helicopter. (Finabel also wrote a great piece about this topic, link at the bottom) Technology Building a new helicopter comes with a lot of opportunities. One of those opportunities is developing new technology. Because a new aircraft design can fully benefit from the new technology developed for it b...

The KDC-10: The aircraft from a generation The KDC-10 was a aerial refueling aircraft from the royal Netherlands air force (RNLAF). It was introduced in 1992 and it kept flying until the 25th from October 2021 when it retired.  This aircraft is special for a couple reasons. First off: it's one of the few european owned tanker aircraft. Second reason is that the dutch KDC-10 aircraft were the only DC-10 based aircraft outside the US air force. Which brings me to the third reason. It is completly different than it's American counter parts. This is because the American KC-10 were build and designed as a tanker. The Dutch KDC-10 are second hand bought DC-10's (from Martin Air) and modified by the dutch into a tanker. WIth a special key feature which is having a RARO system (as far I know the first operational tanker with this system). With this system the boom can be operated from a station behind the cockpit and to keep things dutch the system was developed in the Netherlands....

This is inspired by the famous speech from Churchill during the second world war. In his speech he spoke about the battle of Britain and during that speech he called the pilots: the few. Just like him I reffer in this post also to the pilots as the few while also trying to underline the pressure on the pilots.