Heh - 90 knots is pretty normal windspeed back home. It isn't as destructive as high winds in England for a few reasons:


Trees - none. Or almost none. We have some 40 year old oaks that are 7 feet tall, as that is the height of the wall.
Gusts - none. The wind just blows. From west to east.
Buildings - blimming solid construction!

They are good aircraft - I used to get to fly one round the mountains in the Falklands. And they can land on anything - beaches, mud, grass, runways... And Dad was a bit of a mental pilot (was fleet air arm - Buccaneer pilot!) so would go for any manoevre that seemed fun. He managed a few vertical takeoffs too!

Back on topic - when I used to fly r/c gliders I used to lie on a steep west facing slope and hold a glider at arm's length. A decent 2.5m wingspan glider would happily climb from my hand with a windspeed of anything over about 30 knots (well, less than that at 1m off the ground I suppose.) Landing back into the hand was much trickier - only really simple with a glider with airbrakes/spoilers.

Cool! When were you down there?

Between '82 and '87 I was there a fair bit, and I went back a few times until around '91. Dad set up the Falkland Islands Government Air Service, which up until then consisted of two Beaver floatplanes, and as he was then Loganair's chief pilot and had a fair bit of time in that sort of environment he organised the airfields and procedures etc. It's an amazing place. I keep trying to work out cost effective ways to take SWMBO there on holiday.

Have you managed to visit the islands?

Instead of a conveyor belt, explain it as taking off on a sheet of ice. It is the same principle as the conveyor belt without all the extra red herrings of friction, belt speed, etc thrown in.

Oh! I like that twist!
Then you can ask the question "How long is the landing rollout on ice?"
Answer: the same length as if you didn't touch the brakes on a normal landing. lol

Not yet, but some of my friends have. And I have some interesting "artifacts" from the war. The most interesting is a circular circuit board, designed to fit inside a sewer pipe. It has a radio receiver/detector that detects a combination of 2 audio carrier tunes, and after receiving that special carrier (from, let's say, an airplane with a suitable transmitter that flies past, it counts down for one week (suitable time period to make everything untraceable / deniable) and then issues a detonation signal...

Seems teh argentinians left a bunch of them in sewer pipes, along with a fair bit of TNT...

Speaking of airplanes and Argentina...
Want

/slobber drool

Just found this video clip of a sea plane taking off from a trailer behind a truck.
Who needs a conveyor belt?

edit:
and another of a nifty glider takeoff.

Yes - we ended up with a few souvenirs after they had been defused. The most interesting were some mines, a bazooka and two rifles, but the only ones we got back to UK were the mines. Luckily we didn't find anything booby trapped!

Do you need a deactivation certificate for the mine?

oh yes:-) They were very strict on that, for my antipersonnel and my antitank mine.

picky, picky...