Open Doors LTG62

Written on 17 April 2007. Hits: 14490

The fact that military airshows are not yet fully reestablished within the German Air Force was fully proven during this year's Open Doors Day at Wunstorf AFB near Hanover. The show, being part of the festivities to celebrate 50 years of the Bundeswehr, was celebrated as a "Tag des Lufttransports". Due to this fact only two fighters in form of a German Tornado and Phantom were present on the ramp at Wunstorf and no jet displays were presented during the two short aerial displays in the morning and in the afternoon.

Where? Wunstorf - Germany
When? 18-19/06/2005

However the show attraced a lot of interesting visitors nonetheless if you look out for the big and mighty propeller driven machines. Three Hercules aircraft were present in the static display: a C-130E from Ramstein as well as a British C-130J and an Austrian C-130K. Further foreign participation was a french C-160R and a G-222RM of the Italian RSV. Besides that nearly a dozen more German Transalls could spotted around the airbase during the day as well as several German helicopters (Bo-105PT, EC-135T, UH-1D, CH-35G) were prepared to be inspected by the visitors.
The star of the day was the special marked C-160D Transall 50+50, which was especially chosen to wear the special markings as the registration was modified to represent 50 years of the Bundeswehr and 500.000 flight hours on the Transall.
As a highlight this Transall was presented during the flight display in a rarely seen 4-ship formation of C-160s. Transalls also showed their capabilities to drop cargo and the steep Sarajvo approaches. Another demonstration was a search and rescue scenario that involved UH-1Ds and even three jets were seen in the air above Wunstorf that week-end: what was originally planned as an air-air refuelling demo of an A310MRTT with two Tornados had to be changed the week before due to the grounding of the Tornado fleet to an interception of the tanker by two Luftwaffe F-4F Phantoms.
In the end this Open Doors Day surprised with an diversified static display and was a nice change after all these jet dominated show, however the German Luftwaffe hopefully plans something more noisy for its 50th anniversary that will be celebrated next year at Laage.
(Un)fortunately I could only stop there on Friday on the way to Eggebek, therefore you will not find any photos of the flight display this time.