{"id":24860,"date":"2020-09-28T13:54:46","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T11:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/?p=24860"},"modified":"2020-09-28T14:21:26","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T12:21:26","slug":"looking-for-yankee-mike-a-retired-lufthansa-b-747-200","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/startseite\/looking-for-yankee-mike-a-retired-lufthansa-b-747-200\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking for Yankee Mike – A retired Lufthansa B-747-200"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In normal times this would have been a weekend trip to Switzerland to visit Portmann cigars – the usual VW annual vacation bus trip…<\/p>\n

In normal times – nowadays it is hard to predict what is normal and where you can travel.<\/p>\n

Switzerland won’t let Belgians in without a 14 day Quarantine, so it made no sense for Frank and Jos to drive there.<\/p>\n

Instead they planned a 3 day trip to the village. Question was – what can we do and Frank came up with a visit to the Sinsheim Technikmuseum, a place we had passed on our way south many times and that Jos wanted to re-visit.<\/p>\n

I checked the museum’s website and found a reason to visit it myself, as it has one of our B-747-200 Jumbo jets, D-ABYM or Yankee Mike.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=55-gLrWjGPo<\/a><\/p>\n

Checking my flight log I found that I had 31 duty legs or flights on that aircraft plus one as a passenger on the successor B-747-8 … and 2 interesting ones : A Dead-Head flight from San Francisco back to FRA after Mount St. Helen erupted and our Tokyo flight diverted via SFO in 1986 and one of the fastest Trans-Atlantic flights from Newark to FRA in 6h05 mins due to extreme jet-stream winds westbound in 1999 …<\/p>\n

Nice to see that the aircraft had not ended up in the boneyard and been converted into frying pans and other things….<\/p>\n

After arriving Friday in the village we had a good lunch plus cigars in Worms at Kolb’s Biergarten\u00a0 by the Rhine river<\/a> ( pity the weather has turned cold, it was 35C just 3 days before they arrived ), picked up some wine, said Hi to Andreas at the pharmacy and then had a good dinner and cigars at the Mussel winemaker apartment<\/a> where Frank and Jos were staying.<\/p>\n

Nest day weather turned lousy, windy and rainy. And it was worse at Sinsheim.<\/p>\n

We walked around the really impressive large halls full of all kinds of cars, planes, locomotives, bikes, cannons, tanks, you name it and I was really keen on visiting the 747 …<\/p>\n

Turns out they only have the tail and cockpit of Yankee Mike at Sinsheim – the whole plane is at the sister Museum in Speyer, half an hour away …<\/p>\n

Call it a disappointment. From the outside, from the Autobahn it looks like the whole plane is there, next to a dozen more like the Concorde or the Tupolev Concordski … but it is a tricky mirage and I failed to properly check up.<\/p>\n

OK, we went into the other planes and I swallowed my disappointment.<\/p>\n

Even though Speyer is on the way back to the village, the weather was too lousy to stop there – I will visit another time.<\/p>\n

So it was back to the Rhine river and a late lunch – back to the village and an early dinner plus good cigars and a bottle of Jack Daniels to combat the cold.<\/p>\n

Sunday, after a good breakfast and loading up the VW bus with a load of assembled souvenirs from my 35 years of flying that I had to clean out of the cellar, Frank and Jos drove back to Belgistan – vacation was over …<\/p>\n

Nino<\/strong><\/p>\n

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