Alaska Airplanes (Hope: new home, buying, high school)

[ASpilot2be]

Originally Posted by starlite9

Sounds like a plan! Just hope on the nice days you want to fly, the other shareholders don't want to be up too!

Considering it hasnt been flown since Redoubt blew, I doubt there will be much of a problem.

[Rance]

Last year at the lake...

[starlite9]

Originally Posted by Rance

Last year at the lake...

Whoa, that got me for a minute, that looks almost like my plane!

Didn't remember flying there lately....

Good photo!

[starlite9]

Russian biplane Antonow an-2 at Merril Field in Anchorage, Alaska. It has been sitting there for years appearing to be rotting away...

[warptman]

The person bought the Antonov thinking he could get it certified, that fell through and there it sat since!

[starlite9]

Originally Posted by warptman

The person bought the Antonov thinking he could get it certified, that fell through and there it sat since!

I think he was going to sell them, but the "Jones Act" stopped him from doing that, there were a couple more in the sales loop, but they fell though too.

Don't know why you can't get it certified for Expermental and go from there. At least you would be flying it!

[Rance]

I'm surprised he isn't flying it despite certification. Most of the pilots I know don't even have a license.
If you pulled the lower wings, put it on floats, it looks like the yellow one Warpt had in the u-tube video!

[starlite9]

Originally Posted by Rance

I'm surprised he isn't flying it despite certification. Most of the pilots I know don't even have a license.
If you pulled the lower wings, put it on floats, it looks like the yellow one Warpt had in the u-tube video!

Bet it burns about twenty five gallons an hour though... not to mention the oil they burn...

Use to be on the old round engines it was "Fill up the oil and check the gas"!

Anyone know what the performance spec's for the Russian bird would be? What is the takeoff roll at gross and/or empty? I would guess for something like that it would be in the 500 foot range...at gross (legal)

[rotorhead]

I used to drive past that old hulk every day when I was working for Evergreen at Merrill, is there still an old Bell 47 parked down on that part of the ramp too?

I suspect that AN-2 was caught when the FAA cracked down on the early-90's flood of old ComBlock aircraft and restricted them to registration in the Experimental/Exhibition class, instead of just Restricted category like they used to. You're basically limited to the airshow circuit and your home airfield only, once you get stuck with the Exhibition tag. It's kind of a shame, as the AN-2 would be a pretty dang good bush plane in some limited circumstances. They have such a low stall speed that their short-field performance is astounding for an aircraft with a gross weight pushing 12,000 lbs, something like 500 ft takeoffs and maybe 600 foot landing distances. I suspect they'd give Beavers and such some real competition, and with almost 5000 lbs usable load they're a real heavy hauler as well. With any kind of headwind it looks like they'd even give a standard Cub a run in the STOL game.

Of course, you're also stuck feeding a thousand-HP radial (basically an R-1820 copy), which is gonna run some serious bucks with the price of avgas these days. The downside to the super-low stall speed is the agonizingly slow 90-100kt cruise, and I'm guessing that the high end of that range you're looking at a fuel burn rate of around a hundred gallons an hour. Which means that they'd never be real popular except on very short legs, and even then only at spots where you can tanker gas out from a base with good barge access and relatively cheap fuel.

There's a good article on Wikipedia here Antonov An-2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[ASpilot2be]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

is there still an old Bell 47 parked down on that part of the ramp too?

Yep. It is still there.