Flying the F86!

[pdentrem]

Last night had an extremely rare (to me) the opportunity to sit in a F86 cockpit!

A local couple here in town were leaders in the local Air Cadets group. Both recently moved into a old age home and the contents of their home was sold. 2 fairly complete F86 cockpits were part of this. A museum out western Canada came down and purchased the most complete of the cockpits with spares etc. It was carefully packed in a custom made on site shipping crate, lifted from the back yard over the house via large crane due to the reach and placed onto a flatbed. The second one is still in town at a local company.

After our club meeting, we were told that it was in the warehouse! Well the mad scramble to get down to the main floor was comical! Never mind the dust, Brian, who does flight light aircraft and myself took turns sitting in it.

No parachute in the seat so used some wood cuttings to sit on and loved this opportunity!
Pierre

 

[DavidR8]

Very cool!
When I was a kid one of my favourite books was “Sabre Jet Ace”

 

[francist]

Man, I remember that book….it was Awesome!

 

[7milesup]

Cool! My understanding is the pilots really liked the F-86.

I am almost done with a very good book, Fighter Pilot: Memoirs of Robin Olds.

 

[Manual Mac]

Years ago I read The Hunters by James Salter.
He was an F-86 pilot in Korea.
I really enjoyed it.

 

[SouthernChap]

There's a YouTuber called Iain Christie (he mainly talks about the Flight Sim DCS but also has interest in the history of military flight and also NASA; he's some sort of aerospace engineer, I think) who has a really interesting series of podcasts called "Moving Mud: A History Of Iron Bombing" (well, they're YouTube videos but he characterises them as podcasts; you can happily ignore the pictures) called "The History of Iron Bombers" and the Sabre features a fair bit in a few episodes (as it was pushed into service as a tactical fighter-bomber for a while, due to the lack of other options at the time). He does a really good job of putting the aircraft, their development and their usage into an interesting historical and political (with a small 'p') context.

They're well worth a listen.