Videos Archives - Page 2 of 46 - Golf Hotel Whiskey

A De Havilland Hornet Moth returns home to St Athan

The St Athan military base in the Vale of Glamorgan celebrated its 75th anniversary earlier in the week when it welcomed back a De Havilland Hornet Moth – one of the first planes which took off from there when the old air base opened in 1938.

The history of St Athan and the Hornet Moth are somewhat intertwined because originally the base was intended to be a maintenance base because it was thought to be beyond the reach of the Luftwaffe. However, the fall of France put an end to that belief while the development of rapid monoplane fighters meant that the Hornet Moth was far too slow and vulnerable for combat duties.

Nevertheless, the Hornet Moth found new roles at St Athan as submarine spotters, air taxis and for helping to calibrate early radar installations. All told, around 160 Hornet Moths were built and between 25 and 30 are thought to still be in airworthy condition 75 years later.

One of those airworthy Horner Moths returned to St Athan as part of its 75th anniversay celebration with current owner David Weston telling the BBC:

“People say the design was outdated even then but it was always intended to be an easy-to-fly, easy-to-maintain workhorse, and it does it brilliantly. I bought her from the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire in 1996 and, apart from a slight crash in 1971, she’s been flying continuously all her life and could easily go for another 75 years if she’s looked after properly.”

The BBC also has the following video showing Weston coming in for a landing and then he talks a bit about the history of the aircraft:

Escaping from a coffin while being dropped from a plane

Church deacon and escape artist Anthony Martin’s latest stunt was to free himself from shackles while locked in a casket that was dropped from an airplane at 14,500 feet (4460 meters). The following Fox News segment before the stunt has some details about what was being planned:

Following the stunt, WGN Chicago aired a segment with footage of the jump which you can view by clicking here (as embedding it into this post will have it start automatically!)

Apparently, Anthony did the stunt one other time 25 years ago. This time around, it took him thirty second to pick the locks (something he started learning to do when he was only six years old) and escape, but it wasn’t easy because the plywood casket whipped wildly from side-to-side and he also struggled to open the door.

Everyone involved in the stunt did land safely with no serious injuries. However, one of the skydivers ended up with a fat lip and a scraped arm after being slammed into the door of the plane as they exited while trying to steady the box.

So what was the point of Anthony’s stunt? To sell his new book entitled, “Escape or Die: An escape artist unlocks the secret to cheating death,” which chronicles his four-decade long career as an escape artist.

What could go wrong using a drone to video a wedding?

If you have ever thought about using a drone to video your wedding, you might be wondering what could possibly go wrong, with the answer being that you could end up getting hit on the side of the head as this video shows!:

Apparently, the wedding photographer was using a DJI phantom and a GoPro camera two days before the wedding to do their bridal shoot and the incident occurred near the beginning of the shoot. The photographer/drone pilot had done one successful fly by and brought the contraption around for another pass to make sure it was smooth. However, he underestimated the lift time and hit the groom on the side of the face.

The groom suffered a cut to his cheek and the side of his head, but luckily the couple laughed off the unfortunate incident and the video was eventually completed (click here to see the final video from the shoot, here for the full version of the video and here for the wedding video).

The YouTube page containing the video has also attracted its share of funny to outright negative comments about the wedding photographer’s flying skills….

Videos: Skydiving cats and dogs

Pet owners will do just about everything with their pets, with some going so far as to take their pets skydiving – which should come as a surprise because not too long ago, the fur was flying over this Swedish ad for pet insurance showing skydiving cats:

Of course and as the following CNN segment from Jeanne Moos about the “controversial” ad reveals, the cats were not actually skydiving as some viewers had thought as everything was filmed in a studio (e.g. the cats were blown by fans to give them their slightly grumpy windblown look):

But before you think that nobody in their right mind would actually try skydiving with their pet cat, think again as Jeanne mentioned someone did try it and there is a video on YouTube to prove it:

That video seems to be an exception to the rule (as well as commonsense given how cats usually don’t like noisy places, like inside of airplanes!) that skydiving and cats do not mix. Nevertheless, a quick search of YouTube reveals several skydiving dogs, including Crasha, Big Arnold, Mindy (this video noted the world record holding skydiving dog has 73 jumps and counting) and a Pug named Bugsy.

It should be noted that dogs have been parachuted into war zones and for Artic rescue missions since at least the World War II era as this final video reveals (although their lands do appear rather hard):

With the above videos in mind, we would love to hear your thoughts about skydiving with a pet e.g. Would you ever consider doing it and more importantly, should it even be allowed?

Video: What an old Soviet Antonov An-2 Colt is capable of

Hat tip to the Aviationist blog for finding and posting this old video of an Antonov An-2 Colt’s appearance in a 2006 Krakow air show showing just what the aircraft is capable of. The Antonov An-2 was a Soviet-era workhorse airplane designed by Oleg Antonov that was intended as an all purpose aircraft for just about everything from crop dusting to training parachutists. They even saw combat action in the Korean War, clandestine action over Laos during the Vietnam War and were last used in the Croatian War of Independence against Serbia/Yugoslavia back in the early 1990s.

According to the Antonov An-2’s Wikipedia Page, the aircraft’s high noise levels, increasing maintenance costs, high fuel consumption and unsophisticated nature (as the pre-flight checks take between 30 and 40 minutes) mean they are obsolete for commercial service in Europe and huge numbers are available for very low prices (for as little as $30,000). This of course makes them an ideal aircraft for the developing world where they are used to carry large loads into short airstrips.

The video shows the types of maneuvers an Antonov An-2 is capable of, from aerobatics and low speed passes to loops and extremely short landings:

Meet Britain’s only full-time “flying banker”

The Wall Street Journal recently posted had an article along with a video segment about Anne Rendall, the Royal Bank of Scotland’s “flying banker” who’s a real jetsetter in the sense that she has racked up over 9,000 flights over the years, but that’s because she has been serving customers in the sparsely populated Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland for 25 years. She’s also a regular on the 1.7-mile and minute long flight between Westray and Papa Westray, the world’s shortest commercial flight:

If it were not for Ms. Rendall, residents on remoter Orkney Islands would have to spend a day going to and from the main town on a ferry, plus the island’s Internet service can’t handle a large amount of traffic. So its up to her to come and set up a hut or community center to collect checks, dole out cash and open new accounts. Her great-uncle had also sailed the floating bank that served the islands up until the 1960s before being replaced by a commercial air service.

RBS apparently declined to say whether the “flying bank” is profitable as its costs (including Ms. Rendall’s plane tickets and other travel expenses) are borne by the bank’s main branch in the Orkneys, but a spokesperson did say that her costs are offset by the leads she generates to offer customers products such as loans and the like.