Oops :)

April 2008

This picture requires some explannation :)

I bought my first plane the other day, a Savoia S.21 Seaplane built by Mifune Thibaud of EB Aeronautica. Beautiful detail with moving ailerons, rudder, tail, working cockpit instrumentation, flightstick and other controls. It is an exact duplicate of one of the planes flown in Hayao Miyazaki's animated film, Porco Rosso. I became a great fan of Miyazaki's wonderful films after seeing his "Spirited Away" some years ago. Just an amazingly beautiful, imaginative and touching film. I have seen all his films now except one. If you have never seen any yet, you definitely should...not to be missed.

Before I bought this particular plane I demoed, at EB Aeronautica's airport, a Sopwith Camel, which was a British single seat fighter aircraft from WWI. I am so glad there were no onlookers at the airport when I did this, because they would have been laughing hysterically. The first try I never moved at all after accelerating the throttle but stood the plane on its nose with the engine racing full blast :) The second try, after figuring out that the forward arrow actually means "down" and the backward arrow means "up", based on the way an actual "stick" control would work on an airplane of this type, I finally got it off the ground, careening around crazily in the air, before crashing it in someone's back yard. Thankfully, no one was home :) On a third try, I was able to finally fly around a bit getting used to the controls although I lost my way in the process.

I then went back and bought the Savoia seaplane, for sentimental reasons being a Miyazaki fan, although I probably should have bought a plane with wheels for my first plane. The one I have actually wanted for quite some time now is AM Radio's beautiful plane, that was in the Wheat Field for awhile, but is no longer on display. His plane is based on a 1912 Blackburn Monoplane, and I really love his plane with all the wonderful detail he puts into everything. I hope someday it might become available.

Anyway, when you have bought a seaplane you need a place to fly it where there is water you can set it out on. I didn't realize this was going to be as much problem as it was, but I did finally find a place after some searching, and once I could figure out how to negotiate the tight squeeze between a huge aircraft carrier and a dock which I kept getting hung up on while taxiing out to open water, I finally figured out how to take off, and stay up in the air :) Those two RL flight lessons I had some years ago came into a play a bit in helping me have more control over the plane.

It was fun once I got the hang of it, but after awhile I realized I had no idea how to get back to the spot I started from. Perhaps if I had used the SL map I could have figured it out. I am not sure if that is what pilots in SL use for navigation. I have a lot to learn. But before I could figure out anything more right then, SL crashed while I was flying the plane. When I logged back in hours later, I never changed my location figuring I would just find myself at the bottom of the sea, but to my great surprise I found myself instead in the livingroom of my rental still in my plane, which was quite funny :)


Here are some details about this plane, for those who might be interested, from the builder, Mifune Thibaud's SL Exchange page:

"The E.B. Aeronautica Savoia S.21 is a semi-fictional seaplane racer, inspired by the wonderful drawings and art depicted in Hayao Miyazaki's animated film, PORCO ROSSO. This animated film was set in the time period of the 1920's - 1930's; this is widely considered to be the Golden Years of Aviation.

The seaplanes of Porco Rosso were inspired by the Schneider Cup seaplane races that occured between 1913 - 1931. Miyazaki's film also gives nod to the numerous successes of Italian Aviators and Italian aircraft manufactures of this time period.

The Savoia S.21 is actually more closely based on an Italian seaplane from another well known maker of the time, Macchi and their M.33 seaplane. The Macchi M.33 was a Schneider Cup racer that entered in 1925, but lost to the American's Curtiss R3C-2, piloted by Jimmy Doolittle. In the movie, two configurations of the aircraft were present: a 1 seat model with the engine of the Macchi M.33, and a subsequent 2 seat model with the race winning engine of the Macchi M.39, which went on to defeat the Americans in a later race. Miyazaki's S.21 also resembles a prototype seaplane by Savoia, the S.12, which was cancelled due to poor forward visibility due to the location of the cockpit in relation to the wing and overhead engine. This model is very faithful to Miyazaki's fictional seaplane, with virtually all of the features found in the movie available in this aircraft."