Nice C-47/DC-3 video

RobertL18C wrote:

The quality of aerial videos seems to get higher

I guess it helps if you have a Jet Ranger with stabilised camera for the aerial shots

Nice.

Notice that the main wheel rotates in the well, I thought it wasn’t supposed to (3:20)

Thanks for posting Robert, wonderful.. When i see these things i always think i was born way too late.

When i see these things i always think i was born way too late.

Depends. While aviation in the 20s to 40s was certainly much more “freedom” and " adventure", I’m not so sure I would have enjoyed having been born say 70 years earlier. Being a German pilot in WWII would not exactly be my dream biography.

I read a pretty excellent book once, “Angriffshöhe 4000” by Cajus Bekker, detailing the whole war effort of the Luftwaffe. Fascinating stuff. Ultimately the Luftwaffe was, like all parts of the German war effort, hampered by grand strategic blunders rather than tactical or technical mistakes. Lucky for us today, one might say, because in my opinion Nazi Germany might otherwise have won a limited European war.

The book can be found in English too by the way: https://www.amazon.com/Luftwaffe-War-Diaries-German-Reprint/dp/0306806045

Wonderful video. I find it interesting to see that the 95 year old pilot responds quickly and decisively to questions like “do you want a little more flaps now”, indicating that although he may not be fully prepared to fly the plane, he shows situational awareness after (presumably) a great many years outside of a DC-3 cockpit and at an advanced age. That really made me smile.

I think the best time in many ways to be flying would have been the 1960s and 70s, anywhere in the world. I soloed the first time as a kid in 1980 so I pretty much missed that… but OTOH I think in the US, today, there has never been a more affordable time to buy and own your own plane. We are riding on the shoulders of those who paid for our planes new, and flying them now fully capable but fully depreciated. I’m grateful for that.

I’ve looked after a number of ww2 pilots. The only one who unequivocally enjoyed her job was an ATA pilot.

Two wartime mechanics have told me how glad they were, in retrospect, to have failed the pilot selection process.

Silvaire wrote:

OTOH I think in the US, today, there has never been a more affordable time to buy and own your own plane. We are riding on the shoulders of those who paid for our planes new, and flying them now fully capable but fully depreciated. I’m grateful for that.

I agree. Prices for used planes have never been much more attractive than they are today, but the bad news is that this has to do with the fact that too many are for sale and not enough buyers appreciate the true value of most of the market offerings or are trying to ride the general depression to buy planes much under value. Not so prominent in the US I am told but quite a problem in Europe some times for sellers.

Mooney_Driver wrote:

Prices for used planes have never been much more attractive than they are today, but the bad news is that this has to do with the fact that too many are for sale and not enough buyers appreciate the true value of most of the market offerings or are trying to ride the general depression to buy planes much under value. Not so prominent in the US I am told but quite a problem in Europe some times for sellers.

Sure, I think the market determines the value, and in the US the number of active pilots is smaller than it was three decades ago. However I don’t think that’s the biggest factor in lower inflation adjusted values here. In the US, I think the values are also reduced by there being roughly three generations of practical postwar planes, each of which was intended by the manufacturers to replace the prior generation. What actually happened is many or most of them never disappeared and so in macroscopic terms the average hours per plane sunk, meaning today most have a fraction of the time they are capable of flying and therefore the market for planes has lots of supply along with moderately reduced demand. My planes have averaged about 25 hours per year over their lifetimes and wouldn’t be high time until 4,000 or 5,000 hrs… Do the math, as they say I was happy to ‘play’ in that market. Not all markets available to me or in my life are so advantageous – unless you’re investing and selling as values rise due to the opposite situation with supply and demand.

In Europe there aren’t so many planes but today other factors weigh in to lower demand for GA planes, like land use/value issues in maintaining GA airports, an increasing level of noise intolerance and increasingly intrusive airspace/ATC regulation. I believe those factors (again in macroscopic terms) are directly or indirectly the result of high population density, and the European market response is ultralights – which doesn’t mean you can’t go in a somewhat different direction, buy a Rallye for nothing (one example) and have a lot of fun!

Sorry for the massive thread drift, but it seemed to me an interesting topic. I’m writing in my hangar on an iPhone and can’t figure out out to start a new thread on aircraft values today versus in decades past.