Our first show for 2012 is hosted by Steve Visscher and Anthony Simmons.  Anthony recently travelled to the United Kingdom where he attended the Imperial War Museum at Duxford on their final flying display for 2011.  The theme centred around the Korean War, the aircraft that flew  and the people that flew them. Anthony presents a series of interviews from the day in his first major production for PCDU.
Christmas and New years have come and gone and with the usual festivities over, Â the PCDU team are back on deck and preparing for an exciting year of podcasting.
Plans are being made for attending several local aviation events,  including Natfly,  Tyabb Air Show,  and the Parafield Air Show.  We have been already recorded a few interviews and the team is out &  about making contact with a range of interesting people in the aviation scene in Australia &  New Zealand.  In addition,   Pieter Johnson has already sent us another From Up here to Down There segment.
Episode 81 is in the final stages of production, Â and features some wonderful content from Anthony “The Infrequent Flyer” Â Simmons’ Â recent travels to the UK. Â Keep a look out for this show over the next few days!
We look forward to having you join us again this year, and we hope you’ll continue to contact us with story leads and topic suggestions. Â You can contact us any time at planecrazydownunder@gmail.com , Â or join the conversation on our Facebook Page or Downwind Forum. Â You can also find us on Twitter as @pcdu
You’ll also find us on our regular segments for Flight Time Radio and The Airplane Geeks Podcast
Looks like another busy year. Â Talk to you soon!
As 2011 draws to a close, Â our final show for 2011 has gone live on the feed for you to enjoy. Â Farewell 2011 (Tom Cruise Wraps My Dolmades), Â is the 80th show in the series and our 30th show for the year.
Anthony “The Infrequent Flyer” Â Simmons joins us this time around as we cover a number of topics, Â including interviews from our recent end of year Fly-In at Aus Air Services in Tooradin, Â Victoria.
Come and join us on December 17th at Tooradin Airport (YTDN) as we dust off the mobile studio and have some fun with our friends at Aus Air Services
Grant, Â Steve and Anthony “The Infrequent Flyer” Â Simmons will be in attendance to record an episode of the show, Â assisted by Allan Van’t Padje who’ll be setting up an array of speaker towers and running the panel
BBQ, drinks and discounts on flights all weekend!
We hope to meet you there!
In our latest episode (Tim Smith: Flying Saved My Life) we get to hang out with Melbourne comedian Tim Smith, recording an hilarious chat about his flying. A lot of fun and some great stories along with some serious & important points.
It’s also a relatively short episode, which after our previous one on the Qantas Grounding, is probably a good thing :)
The Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” is branching out further and further around the globe lately as the evaluation programme continues.
With the recent entry into service of the type with launch customer All Nippon Airways, interest has intensified in our region with Air New Zealand, QANTAS & Jetstar eagerly awaiting deliver of their airframes.
On Friday, November 11th,  Dreamliner N787BA,  completed a 13 hour 40 minute transit from Seattle, crossing the Pacific and arriving into Auckland with Air New Zealand Chief Pilot Captain David Morgan and 30 Boeing test & evaluation staff aboard .  The aircraft made a low pass over the city before landing at AKL.
The aircraft will stay in New Zealand for a few days before heading across the Tasman to Sydney.
Listener Daniel Talbot was there for the big event and has kindly shared these pictures.  You can find more of Daniels photography at www.danieltalbot.co.nz
In response to the momentous news that Alan Joyce (CEO) and the board of directors at Qantas had decided to ground the entire airline on Saturday afternoon, Steve & Grant launched into gear to assemble a broad collection of interviews & discussions about the event. The result is a hefty 2 hour, 15 minute episode that’s packed with interviews with politicians, union leaders, Dick Smith, analysts and us. You can read all about it and listen to it by visiting:
PCDU Episode 77: Qantas Crisis: After the Grounding.
In addition to producing this episode, Grant was invited to appear on Al Jazeera’s English channel to briefly discuss the current Qantas grounding.
Here’s the video of the discussion recorded with Grant in the Southern Skies Online Media studio.
Our thanks go to Al Jazeera for providing us with this copy of the discussion and allowing us to display it.
There’s also a “behind the scenes” video that Steve took of Grant in the studio being interviewed:
We can also provide up to 12 high quality weather proofed speaker towers to cater for any occasion – enough to stretch along 300 metres of flight line!
If you’d like to have Grant, Steve and the PCDU team attend your next aviation event, email us at planecrazydownunder@gmail.com
AirVenture Oshkosh 2011 was an incredible experience for the team from PCDU, one that we’re all still getting over. There was so much to do & see and so many wonderful people to meet, naturally we weren’t able to do all we would have liked to. One of the tasks we had that fell by the wayside in the rush was putting out daily updates. Maybe if Grant could have found some RedBull on site, they might have made it out each day :)
Now that we’re back in Australia, we’re being kept pretty busy catching up with our families, getting back on top of everything at our “day jobs” and working through all the content we’ve gathered. It’s going to take a few months to get it all completed, but we’re working on it as best we can :)
You can find the daily reports in our PCDU blog posts on Grant’s Fly Me Friendly site.
Daily Blog Reports:
Day 1 – Getting there isn’t always the best part!
Day 2 – Rockford Bonanza
Day 3 – Arrival en Mass
Audio Episodes:
Oshcast #1
Oshcast #2
Oshcast #3 (Hugging Your Roo)
Episode 73:Oshkosh:The Greatest Show on Earth
It is our intention to cover Oshkosh from a “down under” perspective to the best of our ability. We’ll be looking for the Aussie/Kiwi angle from attendees to volunteers to businesses to government agencies. We plan to produce three episodes during the week of the show and provide constant coverage on our home page, at Aviation Advertiser and through various social media portals. This will include a mixture of audio, video and photographs, presented with the aim of giving you a genuine feel for the spectacle that is AirVenture 2011. As was the case with our Avalon 2011 coverage, we anticipate several follow up episodes featuring additional content after the event. Steve will also be travelling to Arkansas, the place where he completed the bulk of his flight training, to collect interviews with some of the people that influenced his passion for aviation.
We would like to offer our audience the chance to give us some indications of what you’d like to see, hear and (virtually) experience about Oshkosh while we’re over there. By posting your own comments on our updates, you can give us some direction and we’ll try to come through for you if we can.
Joining us at Oshkosh will be Bas Scheffers and David Vanderhoof as well as Mike Wilson who is going to help us with transport, camera and other technical work. We’ve received some amazing sponsorship from Pracy Racing and Jetride Australia who have covered our airfares to Chicago and back (thanks guys!!!! :) while Aviation Advertiser is chipping in to help cover a lot of the accommodation and food costs while we’re there. This has helped immensely but we’re still going to be out of pocket a rather large amount and we’d like to chip in some $$$ to say THANKS to our friends who’ll be helping us while they’re there.
If you’d like to help ensure we can get the coverage you want to hear, feel free to chip in some $$$ via the DONATE button on our home page. We’ve already received a few “Go hard!” packages from friends and every little bit helps. The more we get the more chances we have of being able to run around & pump out the content you want to hear, read & see.
As always, we are not entirely comfortable asking our audience for donations, however, this is a huge undertaking which may exceed the generous funding levels of our wonderful sponsors. In this unique instance, we ask you to consider the substantial effort we put into this programme, entirely on our own time, and give away each month at no cost. We believe our product compares favourably to monthly print publications, yet for less than the cost of a magazine you can help us achieve our goals on your behalf. Your financial assistance for this series of shows would be greatly and humbly appreciated.
We’re really looking forward to this and no matter what, we’re going to bring you along for the ride :)
Meanwhile, here’s the latest animated video from our friends at Thromby Airlines about their foray into online media and podcasters. We hope you enjoy it and recommend you visit their site for more great Thromby Air fun.