Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Tupolev TU154 of the Republic of Poland visits Wellington!

Wow! This is a bit different to the usual run of Boeing and Airbus [and a range of smaller type] airliners to visit Wellington.

Earlier today a Russian built Tupolev TU154 of the Polish Airforce landed at Wellington. I only went to the airfield in the morning to go for a short flight to Martinborough airstrip [a privately owned strip in the Wairarapa - the owner is very friendly, just give him a call before hand if you want to visit!], but I'm glad I stayed until a bit after 3pm.

It's noisy, reasonably ugly and spews forth vast quantities of contaminants into the air - those attributes in and of themselves qualify this as a Russian designed and built plane :-) As usual, for details of this aircraft, check out Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-154.

Anyway, here are some pictures of this event. The first one is just there to show the smoke trail being left behind on final approach. The rest of them give a better view of the aircraft itself. Note the Polish titles on the left side fuselage, and the English on the right. Enjoy!

Polish Tupolev TU154 - smoke trails!Polish Tupolev TU154Polish Tupolev TU154Polish Tupolev TU154

3 comments:

Hawk_180k said...

Interesting! Not you're run of the mill visitor :)

Rodney said...

Gidday mate,

Yeah, that's right! It was due around 1pm, but was delayed [I think it came from Austrlia] until just after 3pm.

It was much noiser than the normal range of aircraft that come in here, even more so than the Airwork Boeing 737-219C that visits from time to time.

Hawk_180k said...

Doesn't suprise me it was loud, Russian built and they probably didn't care all that much about noise heh heh!