{"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":"
<\/a><\/p>\n 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 <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In normal times this would have been a weekend trip to Switzerland to visit Portmann cigars – the usual VW annual vacation bus trip… In normal times – nowadays it is hard to predict what is normal and where you can travel. Switzerland won’t let Belgians in without a 14 day Quarantine, so it made Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,9,1,5],"tags":[1347,1348,33,1027,1351,1346,1350,1349],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24860"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24860"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24863,"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24860\/revisions\/24863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/flyingcigar.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}