Indoor Flying

MAC will resume indoor flying on the fourth Sunday of each month starting April 26, 2009. The winter hiatus was longer than usual this year because the gym at St. Vincent's was needed for basketball.

Have a look at some action from an indoor meeting last Fall: a short video of Tyler's new twin pusher.

Mystery Plane Revealed

Traffic to the blog spiked after I announced the contest on Small Flying Arts, so I know that lots of people looked at the Mystery Plane, but nobody identified it correctly.

Was the Mystery Plane too obscure? The contest is supposed to be challenging; we can't ask you to identify P-51s. Tom says "the more obscure the better" and this is a fairly obscure airplane.

The unusual double-chassis Grade-Eindecker was designed and built by Hans Grade in Germany. These photographs from 1914 show aerobatic pioneer Gustav Tweer at the controls. It is unknown if the plane ever landed upside down on the auxiliary landing gear.

EDIT: Al Backstrom from Texas identified this as a "Grade something or other" which is a good way to describe it. Al emailed his answer after the Mystery Plane was revealed, but I don't think he knew that. Good answer, Al. Thanks for playing our game.

Barnstorming - A Documentary Film

I just learned about this in a new thread at Small Flying Arts.

Barnstorming, a documentary film, screened at the 2nd annual Reel Stuff Aviation Film Festival last week. Further screenings and a DVD are in the works. If the trailer is any indication, this looks like an interesting film with good production values.

Name The Plane Contest

The subject of this month's contest is a strange contraption, to be sure.

Can you identify the Mystery Plane?

The contest winner(s) - everyone to answer correctly by 18:00 PST on Saturday, March 21, 2009 - will be enshrined forever in the blog.

Email you answer here.