Wednesday, October 30, 2024

I'll take them both, thanks.

 




9 comments:

  1. Looks like a Grumman Goose. They used to fly scheduled service between Fajardo PR and St Thomas USVI (And other routes)

    They would always ask for someone to fly in the co-pilot seat and I would volunteer. First time we got to the cruising altitude of 500 feet, the pilot puts it on autopilot, opens up the newspaper and tells me "Keep an eye out for traffic". I had a full set of controls, though no idea what to do with them.

    Since then I have claimed that I have flown as a commercial co-pilot.

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  2. You might not want them, salt water does very bad things to aluminium. The RCMP had a Goose in the '80s, it was in our hangar for months because they had to replace everything below the waterline, one piece at a time, with the airframe in a jig.
    The white one is a Grumman Widgeon, you can tell by the one-piece windshield. The blue-yellow one is a Goose, it has the twin flat windshields with the rounded top edge.
    Al_in_Ottawa

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  3. The corrosion was why the Coast Guard stopped doing water work with the Grumman Albatross (HU16, the Goat)... or so they told us.

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  4. Jimmy Buffetts favorite plane was the Grumman HU-16c Albatross nicknamed Hemisphere Dancer

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  5. ...be a helluva way to bum around the Caribbean for a few years though.

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    1. Not really. No matter where he went in South and Central America, and all the Islands in that area, he wasn't allowed to fly around on a daily basis. The various .govs hated having him there, as his plane made it so easy for any kind of smuggling to potentially happen. Didn't matter that he was a Big Name in music, and Rich, that plane was worthless due to the very strict limits that were laid on the use of it. He gave up and parked it permanently at one of his business locations in FL. His family would arrive on his business jet, but when he arrived in the amphib later in the day, he was unwanted.

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  6. The one with the turboprops is probably more reliable and efficient, but the old girl in the background with the twin radials makes me feel things…

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