Amazing aircraft photos

[skywords]

Nick
Well you really were the lucky dog. Grand Prize Winner! Way to go I could buy ten thousand dollars of lottery scratch tickets and not win a dollar back. My father in law just walks by slot machines and they spray money at him. Some have and some don't. I consider myself lucky though for in the 650 skydives only one malfunction.

In my flight simulator program there is a Concorde and it is the hardest airplane to fly. Has to be on the numbers exactly during the aproach. the landings are blind because of the angle of attack. I wonder if the real airplane was that way? You have to use the radar altimeter to judge the flare and half the time I sail off the end of the runway. All landings are IFR.

Rick

 

[Nickodell]

Rick: Yes, I've been more than usually lucky on sweepstakes and raffles. Won $4,000 on the Irish Sweep back in 1964, and I'm actually ahead by several $100 on both trips to the Atlantic City one-armed bandits and the State Lottery scratch-offs.

Believe it or not, this was the second sweepstakes (the singular of the word also ends in "s") I won on British Airways. Back in 1993 I won two free round/trip tickets, but only in coach. As a publicity stunt, BA ran what they called "The World's Greatest Sweepstakes," when, on one day, every seat on every plane they were flying worldwide was up for grabs on the contest. The Grand Prize winners in that sweep won their choice of any destination BA flew to worldwide, next down rode the Concorde, next got First Class, and so on. I guess our coach seats were just a warm-up for the main event 5 years later.

My secret for winning sweepstakes for something that you really, really want is to enter multiple times if the rules permit it. My wife and I completed over 120 entries in 3 days for the Concorde trip. Each one had to be hand-written on a 3 x 5 card and enclosed in a hand-addressed envelope, and involved writing on each one your name, address, phone number, DOB, nationality, closest airport, how often you fly the Atlantic, favorite airline, etc., plus answering a series (12?) of questions about the Concorde that appeared for a week in BA newspaper adverts. Total time to write these was some 12 hours, and at the end of this we were suffering writer's cramp. I can still remember some of them:

Q: How high does Concorde normally cruise? A: 58,000 ft.
Q: What is the shortest time it has flown New York to London? A: 2 hours, 58 minutes, 59 seconds.

I forgot; one of the additional goodies was a superb glove-leather bomber jacket with the Concorde embroidered on the back. As I had a jacket already and reckoned that after wearing the Concorde one a few times the embroidery would come unstitched and dirty, I sold it on ebaY for $350.

Ah, those inocent days not so long ago, before 9/11, before the Paris crash, before the French stabbed BA in the back by refusing to continue servicing and making parts for the planes. Now it's as if they never existed.

Here's the 20 winners and companions, plus cabin crew and sweepstakes support staff. I'm in the front row, to the left of the girl in the red jacket. The sign says RIDE THE ROCKET. TRIP OF A LIFETIME.