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Tucked away inside a small north Queensland hangar are two planes that belong to a bygone era, flown by men with a deep appreciation of the past. With their bright retro colours and open cockpits, the World War II-era Tiger Moth biplanes almost look out of place in modern-day Mackay. They have been kept in pristine condition by the sons of Fred Christiansen, who once used them to ready fighter pilots for combat. Before and after the war, Mr Christensen worked in the sugar cane industry around Mackay, and he eventually settled in the "sugar city". He also passed on his love of flying to his two sons. One of them, Greg Christensen, 69, a founder of the Mackay Tiger Moth Museum and himself a pilot, recently reluctantly hung up his pilot's cap and goggles. But he's urging others to get involved, saying it's important to many descendants of local war veterans to preserve these moving memories of their past. "There's other blokes that are quite a bit older — a couple of guys are in their 70s," he said. "That is the only volunteer-based museum [housing Tiger Moths] where there's no profit going to... the pilots and the ground crew." As well as preserving the air crafts and their history, the Mackay Tiger Moth Museum has given passengers a unique glimpse of Mackay through an open cockpit.(Supplied: Mackay Tiger Moth Museum) WWII training aircraft The De Havilland Tiger Moth was first manufactured in the United Kingdom in 1931. During World War II, Tiger Moths were used as military training aircraft in Commonwealth countries, including Australia. According to the Royal Australian Navy, almost 1,100 of the planes were build in Australia between 1940 and 1945. The two Tiger Moths were purchased by the museum in the 1970s, to prevent them being sold overseas. The Tiger Moth Museum has been run by volunteer crew and pilots for decades.(Supplied: Mackay Tiger Moth Museum) Mr Christensen flew them for about 40 years. "My father was an instructor during the war, teaching people to fly in Tiger Moths. "My brother... was our first chief pilot and he taught most of us to fly the Tiger Moths." Mr Christensen completed his last flight in recent months, before moving south to be with family. "I did in excess of 1,500 joy flights around the town, so I got to see a fair bit," he said. He made sure his final passenger was someone special. "My wife was onboard. [She] was looking after the kids while I was playing with those things. It was quite nostalgic," he said. WWII descendants among museum pilots The Tiger Moths have been a common sight in Mackay's skies for more than 40 years.(Supplied: Mackay Tiger Moth Museum) Many volunteers and pilots at the Mackay Tiger Moth Museum are descendants of WWII veterans. Mr Christensen now hopes younger pilots will step up to the controls. "The aeroplanes are in great nick...[they] will outlast the people," he said. "It'd be great to see the younger people get enthused and get as much out of it as we have. One of the museum's Tiger Moths was built in 1943 and the other in 1942. Both have undergone expensive repairs and refurbishments over the years. The team of volunteers sells joyrides, with the proceeds invested in maintenance of the planes. Mr Christensen said the historic aircraft had long surpassed people's expectations and would still be gracing Mackay's skies for a long time to come. "They were supposed to go five years. That's what their life expectancy was," he said. "They'll go on forever."

Seb Toro came to Australia to make his dream of becoming a pilot come true, but after years of classes with Soar Aviation he has little to show for it other than a $77,000 debt. His aim of getting his commercial pilot’s licence is nowhere nearer, in a similar story for many previous Soar Aviation students. Students have been stranded with Soar Aviation, one of Australia’s biggest flight schools, placed in administration. Mr Toro said he called it quits with the flight school after growing increasingly concerned about safety and teaching standards, after witnessing a dangerous crash that almost claimed the life of a fellow student in 2019. “The crash happened right in front of the window where we were studying,” he said. “It was a really bad situation. A poor pilot student who was in that horrible situation, it was lucky he survived.” The student at the flight school was left trapped after being involved in a serious crash at Moorabbin Airport on December 12 2019, that saw his plane flip and crash. A finding into the crash is yet to be handed down by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, but it came after another serious crash of a student at Stawell in Victoria in October 2018. The ATSB found the 2018 crash was caused after “contrary to the aircraft’s limitations and the pilot’s qualifications, aerobatic manoeuvres were conducted during the flight, and immediately prior to the loss of control”. “Aerobatic flight should not be undertaken by pilots who have not been adequately trained, as it requires specialist techniques and methods to maintain control of the aircraft during significant manoeuvring,” investigators noted. “This accident clearly demonstrates the catastrophic consequences when the hazards of aerobatic flight are not managed.” More recently, a student and a trainer from the school died in a crash at Carcoar, south of Orange in the central west of NSW, in November in an attempt at a touch-and-go landing. Mr Toro said he was concerned about the instructors at Soar Aviation who were “very new to the industry”. “I still remember having one instructor from New Zealand, he got lost when we went for a flight,” he said. “I was a student and I ended up guiding the situation.” Mr Toro said the issues at Soar Aviation extended to its planes. “Some students had technical issues, one had a door open mid-flight,” he said. “They got planes that were for sporting. The planes were not designed for training purposes. Soar Aviation has 56 planes, but put up seven for sale in 2020 seeking to cover $500,000 in losses. Figures in the flight teaching industry said many of the planes used by Soar Aviation were considerably cheaper to operate than the Cessna 172 Mr Toro said the students saw advertised. Soar Aviation’s business model was built around providing part-time pilot training to students through its education partners in Sydney and Melbourne. Students were covered by VET-fee help for up to 200 hours of flight time, but anything extra was out of pocket for students. Its deal with the Box Hill Institute at one stage saw it teaching hundreds of students, but by the time it shut near the end of 2020 it had been whittled down to just 126 students. This is fewer than the almost 200 students currently members of a class action headed by Gordon Legal, alleging that the flight school did not meet CASA requirements, and delivered substandard teaching. Mr Toro said he was concerned that Soar Aviation kept trying to keep students flying despite them failing to progress to licences. “My problems started with getting massive overrunning hours without seeing a light to get my licence,” he said. “Management was pushing its instructors to push people to fly no matter the weather. “The extra repetitions that was the big concern for us, if you run out of your 200 hours the extra hours were out of pocket.” Mr Toro said he signed up to Soar Aviation because the offer to study part-time meant he was able to continue working. He was quickly concerned about the “very poor student support” and how few people were able to progress to a commercial pilot licence. “The internal exams were so easy to pass, but the ones that really mattered were the ones by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority,” he said. “The majority of students failed to comply with CASA regulations because of the poor quality theory training.” Mr Toro said he and fellow students had brought up issues with Soar’s former CEO, Neel Khokhani, and its education partner, the Box Hill Institute. “I had a very stressful meeting with the Dean of aviation. He said you can drop the course and nothing more happens,” Mr Toro said. Mr Toro said Mr Khokhani was mostly absent during his time at Soar Aviation, speaking to his class once. Mr Khokhani declined to comment.

Satellites – and drones – were intended to replace it. But the 65-year-old Lockheed U-2 is still at the top of its game, flying missions in an environment no other aircraft can operate in. Nearly twice as wide as it is long, the Lockheed U-2 spy plane is one of the most distinctive aircraft in the United States Air Force – and the hardest aircraft to fly, earning itself the nickname “The Dragon Lady”. The U-2’s 63ft-long (19m) thin fuselage, two high-aspect, un-swept glider-like wings, and powerful engine are designed to rocket the plane higher than 70,000ft (21km) – and, crucially, keep it there. The U-2 operates at such height and at such a wafer-thin margin between its maximum speed and its stall speed that pilots call its cruising altitude “coffin corner”. The missions there last hours at a time. The aircraft’s slender design is sometimes difficult to see. Often, it is covered in pods, spiky antennae, mysterious bulges and nosecones hiding the sensors, radar, cameras and communications equipment it needs to complete its missions. These different sensors can be plugged into the plane almost as if someone was building a model kit. There is an urban myth that one such bulge or pod contains a cloaking device – an electronic signal that renders it invisible to radar. At 70,000ft and above, the “Dragon Lady” still has the stratosphere largely to itself, just as it did 65 years ago on its first flight. At these altitudes, the pilot is more astronaut than aviator. In the cocoon-like, pressurised cockpit of the U-2, wrapped in a bulky pressure suit with a large spherical helmet, the pilot breathes 100% oxygen. Some of the features of this kit can still be found on spacesuits in use today. In air this thin the margins between living and dying are narrow. Indeed, the pilot faces the constant danger of hypoxia (lack of oxygen) and altitude-induced decompression sickness. Like any plane, the U-2 has to fly fast enough that the plane doesn’t stall and not so fast that the plane breaks up – the challenge for the U-2 pilot is that at 70,000ft there may be only a few miles an hour difference. An accidental nudge on the controls could spell disaster. Close to the ground the plane’s mechanical controls, easy to manipulate at high altitude, now take muscle power. The U-2’s lightweight design makes the plane liable to float over runways, bounce back into the air if the landing is too hard and very sensitive to cross winds. The weight-saving bicycle-style landing gear makes it difficult – and hard work – to keep the plane in a straight line and its wings level as it slows down. The visibility from the cockpit is so limited that when landing the pilot has to rely on instructions from another U-2 pilot driving a car that races on to the runway when the plane is coming into land. These chase cars have reached speeds close to 140mph (224km/h). The U-2 was designed to snoop over Soviet territory in order to keep tabs on the USSR's military “The U-2 really attracts the kind of pilots who want to say ‘I fly the most difficult aeroplane in the inventory’,” says Greg Birdsall, Lockheed Martin’s U-2 deputy programme manager. “They take a pilot candidate and put him in a trainer aircraft with a seasoned instructor pilot in the backseat to see how they take to the peculiar handling characteristics of the aeroplane.” Only around 10–15% of pilots who apply to join the programme are accepted. In the age of automation and algorithms it is easy to imagine that these spy planes and their pilots with the “right stuff” are a relic from the Cold War – but that would be wrong. For the 31 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U-2 has been intercepting speech or text, acquiring electronic signals, taking photographs and using a special form of radar to capture digital imagery. The U-2 has also acquired new roles, like that of a data relay. Its ability to fly high in the sky meant that it was in the perfect position to relay information from the battlefield to headquarters. In the process it has outlasted rival planes and seen off the surveillance satellites that were supposed to make it redundant. Now the 31 operational U-2s in the USAF fleet are about to undergo a $50m (£37.8m) update and acquire a new mission which could see them fly on for another 30 more years. It may also see them go head-to-head with a drone so secret that its existence has yet to be officially acknowledged. “We are not going away as a programme and we are investing heavily to bring the U-2 into its new mission environment,” says Lockheed Martin U-2 programme director Irene Helley. “In this new era there is no sunset date planned.” Although no relic, the U-2 is certainly synonymous with the Cold War. In the 1950s, President Dwight D Eisenhower’s administration received several shocks over the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities. This was due to its intelligence gap. The Soviet Union was a closed society that was difficult for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to penetrate. The lack of spies in the right places meant that the president needed a high-altitude spy plane to tell him exactly what the Soviet Union was up to. And he needed it quickly. Landing a U-2 comes with some very special challenges In engineering genius Kelly Johnson and his team at the secretive “Skunk Works”, Lockheed had exactly the people to create it for him. The mythology of the “Skunk Works” was born when Johnson and his engineers designed and built the airframe of USAF’s first jet in just 143 days back in 1943. In late 1954, they set to work on this secretive spyplane. The plane had to sustain flight above 70,000ft, have a 3,000-mile (4,800km) range and carry 700lb (212kg) of equipment. The U-2 flew for the first time only eight months later, on 1 August 1955, in a remote location in Nevada now known as Area 51. It was clear that Johnson and his team had come up with something special. “The U-2 marks the start of a shift towards technical intelligence that is solving these intelligence problems not by John le Carré-style spies on the ground, but through advanced technology,” says Peter J Westwick, director of the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He also wrote Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft and says, “the U-2 is really kind of the first big technological jump into technical intelligence”. The U-2’s story could have been very different. In 1966 its future looked bleak; only 15 of the original 55 U-2s built were still in operation. Crucially, the decision was made to restart production in the 1980s, a tricky business when many of the original engineers had retired. The planes that flew off the rebuilt production lines certainly looked similar to the original, but they were nearly 40% bigger and had a new modular design in order to carry more – and heavier – equipment, and switch it more easily for different kinds of missions. The U-2s in operation today can carry nearly three times as much twice as far and fly for three times as long as the original aircraft. In the 1990s they were substantially updated again; that upgrading process continues to this day. The U-2 has so far seen off at least five possible replacements. The first, in the 1970s, was from the first-generation UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). The whale-like Northrup Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, a high-altitude remotely piloted surveillance aircraft, is one of the most recent. When it first appeared in 1998 the U-2 was more than 40 years old. To pay for the U-2’s update, 24 Global Hawks are going to have to be scrapped. With the Global Hawk sidelined, the evolution of the U-2 can take its next step. The changes to the plane will include better avionics, a touchscreen cockpit (that you can use with a pressure suit) and a new mission computer that will allow the plane to run the new Open Mission System (OMS). A bit like a spyplane equivalent of the Android system you might find on your mobile phone, OMS will enable aircraft like the U-2 to talk easily to the computer systems of tanks, ships, aircraft, satellites and even cyberweapons. The U-2's design - a slim body and long wings - help keep it aloft in the thin air of the upper atmosphere “That the U-2 can serve for another 30 years is really down to the genius of the folks who designed the plane,” says Helley. “When we started rolling off new versions of the plane it was built to have an excess amount of power and space – and the modular way it was redesigned… allows us to continually upgrade it or equip it to serve different types of missions. “We can take something from concept to a demonstration flight and then testing in the field within weeks or months.” The U-2’s experience has been a benefit. “It has a proven high-altitude performance,” Helley says. “There is also the recognition that its airframes are still basically teenagers. They have about 80% of their design service life left.” Manned platforms are also much better at dealing with surprises than computers. “If you look at space and some of the other types of surveillance capabilities, they depend on a great deal of pre-planning to provide the information required. In contrast, the U-2 is always available and can be ready at a moment’s notice.” “What I am often asked is, why can’t satellites do what the U-2 does?” says Chris Pocock, a former aviation journalist and the author of books about the U-2. “Well, they have fantastic capabilities now, but a predictable orbital path. This means that low-orbit spy satellites aren’t over any one area for very long, whereas the U-2 can loiter for a long time over one specific spot.” Satellites are also increasingly vulnerable to countermeasures such as lasers that can blind spy satellites, jamming or even missiles that can damage or destroy a vital satellite. The U-2 helped to pioneer the use of a data link to relay intelligence to ground stations which might be thousands of miles away, bouncing the signal first to a satellite above it. Now this role will become more important with the USAF’s ambition for all its computers, irrespective of which company made them, to be able to talk to each other. New sensors or cameras are to be added and removed from the plane quicker and cheaply than ever before and compared to it its rivals. The U-2 does have one problem: it’s not particularly stealthy. And that means it cannot fly over the airspace of other countries without their knowledge. A U-2 was recently spotted by Chinese military flying over their military exercises in South China Sea. It now appears that US defence contractor Northrup Grumman has now built a small fleet of top-secret drones that look like its B-2 bomber to do precisely this. Some believe it could replace the U-2. The Boeing X-37B spaceplane could one day launch tiny satellites which could perform some of the U-2's missions These yet-to-be de-classified high-altitude, long-endurance reconnaissance drones popularly called the RQ-180 must have cloaking devices as only the odd “possible” photograph has ever surfaced, an astonishing feat in the digital age. While a cloaking device is a fictional piece of stealth technology that allows planes or spacecraft to become invisible, the top-secret drone is known for its unusual light colour that makes it hard to spot. This has earned it the nickname “Great White Bat”, or more whimsically “Shikaka”, a fictional sacred white bat from the film Ace Venture 2. “Whatever I say must be considered provisional,” says Pocock. “It must be very stealthy if it’s going to go into denied territory and do what the U-2 does over friendly territory, but I don’t think it will replace the U-2 because it’s apparently fantastically expensive, they are not making many [as few as seven] and there may be not many occasions when they can get permission to fly.” Micro-satellites pose a greater threat to the future of the U-2. Weighing between 10 to 100kg (22 to 220lb) they are small enough to be launched from spaceplanes such as the Boeing X-37. “These micro satellites can be launched from a single rocket launch in such large numbers that they begin to overcome the vulnerabilities of spy satellites in low Earth orbit,” says Pocock. “If you have got 10 or more satellites going around the Earth in chains then you’re are revisiting the same place on Earth in hours not days.” Yet Helley is confident that the U-2 will see off the threats from future rivals as well as it did the earlier ones. “What else serves in the environment that the U-2 does?” she says. “We see the U-2 as a North Star in a very large constellation of real-time information gathering and dissemination.” “It is a hard, hard environment to operate in,” adds Birdsall. “Trying to develop something to take its place, or even to complement it at that altitude, wouldn’t be quick, wouldn’t be easy, and would be very costly. When you’ve already got the capability that we’ve got, why do it?”

This quiz contains basic questions as an introduction to flight

One of the world's rarest planes has made its final flight, touching down in a western Victorian town that fundraised for two years to bring it home. The Australian-made Wirraway was used to train pilots at the Nhill airbase during World War II. At its peak, there were as many Royal Australian Air Force personnel at the airbase as the population of Nhill. Today the population of Nhill, which is halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide, is about the same at just 2,000. The plane is made up of parts from countless discarded Wirraways, and is among the best preserved in the world. Aircraft engineer Borg Sorensen spent 10 years scouring the country for the parts, and another eight putting the pieces back together. He found his first Wirraway in Horsham, an hour from Nhill, hacked apart with an axe and spread over five paddocks. The Wirraway is welcomed by a large crowd at the Nhill Aerodrome.(ABC TV) Community funding brings plane home On Saturday Mr Sorensen flew the historic aircraft for the last time, from Frankston to the Nhill Aerodrome. "It was the first production-built aeroplane in Australia," Mr Sorensen said. "I wanted it preserved. I built it to preserve a Wirraway because there are not many left." The Wirraway was used to train Royal Australian Air Force pilots at the Nhill airbase during World War II.(Supplied: Nhill Aviation Heritage Centre) The community met its $300,000 fundraising target just hours before the plane touched down. Nhill Aviation Heritage Centre president Rob Lynch said the support for the project had been unprecedented. The project is entirely community funded. Weeks out from the landing an anonymous donation of $15,000 was received. It is hoped having the aircraft at the base will help commemorate the men who trained at Nhill and died at war. Construction underway at the Royal Australian Air Force Base at Nhill in 1941.(Supplied: Nhill Aviation Heritage Centre) Mr Sorensen could have sold his Wirraway for almost twice as much on the international market, but he knew it belonged at Nhill. "We'd been flying it for 16 years, my son and I, and we started going round doing airshows and then all of a sudden I thought 'That's really not what I built it for'," he said. "My reason for building it was to preserve it and when they put it to me, would I consider selling it, I thought 'Yes, that will just suit me fine'." Max Carland flew Wirraways during his training in the air force.(ABC Western Vic: Jessica Black) 'Amazing to see the thing still working' Max Carland flew fighter planes in New Guinea in World War II and came of fighting age with the Nhill airbase on his doorstep. "Most of the people at Nhill joined the air force because there was an air force stationed here," he said. "Having flown the Wirraway during my training days, it's amazing to see the thing still working." But the Wirraway was not without its faults. "Another thing it used to do that we didn't like very much was it used to, on starting, sometimes the engine would catch alight, so every time we started a Wirraway engine, we had to have a big fire extinguisher." Merv Schneider was a radio navigator and trained at the Nhill airbase before he was old enough to serve. "Our fighter pilots were Wirraway-trained. Being built in Australia, the opportunity of one coming home to Nhill really brings home the significance of the Wirraway."