Ingolstadt-Manching,  3 May 2006

Early in the morning of May 3rd I picked up Mark Verstraaten at his home to begin our trip towards Southern Germany. At 4 o'clock in the morning we departed from Veghel towards the south. As it's more than 7 hours of driving we decided to make a short stop at the Auto & Technik Museum at Sinsheim. Here are some aircraft parked outside which you can even take some pictures of, without entering the museum and paying a lot of money. Very nice to see a French Concorde and a Russian Tu-144 Concordsky next to each other.

After stretching our legs at Sinsheim we drove further towards Ingolstadt-Manching. As we turned of the highway we noticed that one of the Eurocopter Factories was located every nearby. Mark and I decided to pay a short visit to the Factory of Donauwörth. Besides the many civil helicopters also a few military helicopters were noted. Two Bö-105's and a Tiger were seen here during our first stop. Later this day when we stopped here again we saw 4 Tigers and two NH90's. Below you'll find a shot of the Tiger taken through the fence.

From Donauwörth we drove towards Neuburg where JG 74 is stationed. Unfortunately they didn't fly here at all, so we only noted a few F-4F's in the shelter area. Around 13.15 o'clock we arrived at the airbase of Ingolstadt-Manching. Unfortunately we were to late to see the arrival of the Swiss Hornets which already arrived at 12 o'clock. However we did see the arrival of the six Finnish Hornets which will also take part in the ELITE Exercise and the very nice support aircraft, a Finnish F-27. Unfortunately the WTD 61 aircraft didn't fly much during this day. Only a F-4F, a CH-53 and a C-160 went airborne. Besides all this also a Bf-109 was flying and they made a few taxi runs with their Me-262. Too bad it didn't fly!!

After we left Ingolstadt-Manching we visited the Max Immelmann Kaserne near Ingolstadt to see the RF-84 Thunderflash which is used as gateguard. From here we drove to Neuburg again to see the gateguard at the Wilhelm Frankl Kaserne. At the end of the day after we checked in at our hotel we had a quick look at Landsberg where we noted twelve C-160s and fourteen UH-1s and some very nice visitors.