A bit of a long shot but as a W & R candidate myself, I wonder if anybody can resolve one of my long-standing spotting mysteries.
In the late eighties I used to travel fairly regularly to Saudi on business, the best trips being our own exec. jet from UK. For fuel reasons we used to land at Cairo International and on one such visit in June '89 we were on a westerly approach when I saw a most amazing site. Beneath us was a military airfield ( Cairo West ? Almaza ? ) - in the bottom ( SW ? ) corner was an active section with 3 x Falcon 20's plus some Sea Kings but the rest of the airfield was covered in wrecks . I counted 17 x Il-14, 1 x C-123 (!),2 x AN-2, numerous Mil helicopters plus 10's of MiG's / Sukhoi's just sitting derelict in their revetments. It honestly looked as though they had just been left following one of the Israeli conflicts but that was '67 or '73 i.e at least 16 years previously ! I would dream of a list but given the security at that time I wonder if anybody else at least witnessed this hoard of wrecks ????
Cairo itself was pretty neat W&R -wise : 11 x AN-12, 4 x C-47 , 2 x 707, a Heron ,2 x Beech 18's ,plus single examples of Cv440 and Comet. Not the place to wave binoculars around for long but I did log some . Then there were the delights of the huge scrap dump near the end of Dhahran's runway....................but enough nostalgia for one night.
This is a subscription only section
Want to read more? It's only €10/year.
No account yet? Just Create an account first and head to the shop