Saturday, July 13, 2019


Eastern bloc trainer jet, made in Italy? Yugoslavia? Need some help here. 

Spent part of the morning at the end of the Flying Cloud runway, watching take-offs and landings of vintage craft with my new neighbor, Andy. Watching the old WW II and Vietnam hardware at the Air Expo is always fun, but particularly so with a former fighter pilot who can interpret the squawks from the control tower. Andy, my age from Fergus Falls, flew F-111s for the military during the Vietnam era and later piloted commercial craft for a major airline. He’s retired now and mostly pilots his sailboat on Minneapolis lakes. We gazed skyward at formations of old prop training craft, got a glimpse of an Eastern bloc jet landing, and saw what we believed to be a B-36, similar to the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bomber. Free entertainment, taken where you can get it.