TIL (Biggles related)

[sholio]

... the de Havilland Dove (used in Looks Back to pick them up from a field in Rodnitz) is NOT small! I was picturing it something like the Auster they sometimes use, a small craft like this with 2-4 seats. It's not like that at all! It's like this:



Reading about the Dove led me to find out that it was competition for the Douglas DC-3, a WW2 cargo craft that's still relatively common in Alaska (we see them, or aircraft like them, flying over our house a lot; we're under one of the main flight approaches to the airport, which does a lot of local short-range cargo flights) - and that led me to this page about a DC-3 having to make an emergency landing at a small-plane airport in Anchorage circa 2021.

Check out the part that starts at about 0:20 where it's coming in low over all those smaller planes! It looks like a special effect. Also, I used to live near that airport and it's right in the middle of the city and a few blocks from the hospital, so very good job to the pilot guiding it in, honestly.

Watch on YouTube

(Edit: Also, the audio is worth listening to on this if it's a thing you're interested in - it's the radio recording from the takeoff and emergency landing, in case you want to hear radio chatter from something like that.)

Anyway imagine landing one of those in a beet field.

Comments

[timespirt]

Reminds me when that plane landed on the Hudson river in NY. What a miracle and a great bit of flying it was, like in the vid above.

[philomytha]

Ha, my DH Dove-related bit of Bigglesy research yesterday was discovering that in today's money, buying one would set you back about half a million pounds. And Biggles just casually dispatches Bertie to do that overnight! No wonder he was miffed about EvS getting into difficulties for lack of a couple of hundred pounds that Biggles would have happily stood him...

[leesa_perrie]

Wow! That landing is scarily amazing!

[passingbuzzards]

Wow, that landing! Thank you for sharing this.

(I think I wasn't surprised by the Dove's dimensions when I looked it up later since it appears to be a match for the plane on the cover... :-D)

[black_bentley]

We went to the National Museum of Flight for my birthday last year (🤓) and they've got a Dove in one of the hangars - I'm sure I took a photo of it for philomytha - and I too was surprised by how big it was! Like you, I'd been expecting something more Auster-sized.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I gasped when I saw the video, even though I knew from your text what to expect.