A captured American spy plane that crashed during a Hungarian pleasure flight

Tangential.

The lead says "crashed into a high-rise building in Zugló during a sightseeing flight in Budapest" but as the article details later, it didn't crash into such a building. If you know the area this is even more confusing because there is a unusually high sixty meter high building very close https://i.imgur.com/3a7EiQ4.png and people vaguely know it's from the sixties, however this rather hideous building was built in 1965. In the 60s, the regime was mostly building mid rise concrete buildings with very few high rises as an architectural sign of triumph. This particular building in Zugló was for a few years one of the highest buildings in Budapest and certainly the highest apartment building. Even today the highest apartment building is only 71 meters high.

Another very Hungarian story about high rises is the one in Pécs. It was the highest building in the country at 82m built using novel Yugoslavian technology 1974-1976. Due to rushing the construction and skipping a very small amount of necessary special material, the pretensioned cords holding the building together rusted, the residents were evacuated in 1989 and eventually the building got demolished in 2016. Skipping a bucket of special "inhibitor" material -- seriously, for the entire building that was all needed -- and a few sheets of plastic in the mid 70s then ignoring the troubling findings of checkups in the early 80s leading to the inevitable loss of the building is just archetypical of socialist Hungary.

Wow if that is a news site, its design and UX is a breath of fresh air! No ads/clean, scroll to the bottom and the bottom of the site is clear with a nice little index and only a few little internal only article links.

I cannot wait for a world where all the traditional online news sites are back to an inoffensive and untiring design like this, instead of the shameful spam links everywhere and especially at the never ending scroll/bottom of the sites. That is the worst experience ever, and compared with a lovely site like telex.hu, the difference is profoundly stark.

Sounds like a center of gravity problem. Incorrect weight distribution in a plane can make it uncontrollable, where the cg is in relation to the wing significantly changes the flight characteristics. Especially if you are to, say, try to make some impressive turns for your new lady friend in the cockpit.

With today’s sensibilities the idea that you would fly civilian passengers regularly on a captured airplane sounds crazy.

An airplane like that is basically unsupported. You have no idea if your maintenance is adequate or if they have discovered any flight safety issues with the type. How would you know the provenance of your spare parts? Are they the right stuff or the rejects from some scrapyard? What if you discover a minor issue who do you contact to check if any corrective action is needed? “So about your airplane we confiscated a few years ago: the fifth spar has a longitudinal crack. Bela recons he can drill it to stop it from further propagating. Can we still fly it?” Would be a funny conversation.

> However, its fifth trip was irregular from the moment it took off because, although the plane weighed 145 kilograms below the maximum load limit, as we have mentioned before, it was carrying too many passengers: Although only ten tickets had been sold, 17 adults and six children were on board

145 kg below maximum seems very low for the number of passengers on-board? Especially for a short pleasure flight where you wouldn't have much luggage/cargo nor I'd expect the plane to be carrying full tanks of fuel either. According to Wikipedia DC-3 carries 21-32 passengers (depending on configuration).

Probably just your normal case of overzealous newspaper headline.

However the plane in question was a dc-3(the military variant c-47). So not a "Spy" plane. Also it had 4 people on board. This, as far as I can tell, was the normal military flight crew (pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and radio operator), that is, no additional crew to operate any sort of spying apparatus.

I guess if I am feeling conspiratorial, the orders "Go fly over Hungary, noting radio frequencies and air space intrusion responses" could have been given, but I am inclined to believe the wikipedia page which states they got lost on the way to belgrade. However I am sure the hungarian government claimed they were spying. So I will forgive the headline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Mal%C3%A9v_Hungarian_Airl...

I think the interesting thing I learned was that the soviet union manufactured the dc-3, and that this predated the war, the soviet union bought a design license from Douglas in 1936 and Lisunov spent two years in the us learning how to build them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisunov_Li-2

“Pleasure flight” sounds a whole lot more scandalous than a sightseeing trip.

my money is on funny business with the ladies in the cockpit. once the pilots fell out of their seat it was over

Is pleasure flight a euphemism for something?

I just ELFOGADOM’d something. I have no idea what that means but it made the dialog go away, so I’m happy.

Is this what GDPR working was supposed to look like?