Additionally there is something new: We have a new airplane! It is a Short Skyvan again, but this time managed by Advanced Aviation, and without lying, these are the best pilots we ever had!

View into the cockpit

Detlef Köhler from space-tourism.net on the test flight with the new Skyvan

Mission 20

APM 20 stood totally in the signs of "The Incredible": The flight was made as promotion for the equally named movie which started in the first week of December 2004, that's why the german synchron speaker of Mr. Incredible, Markus Maria Profitlich, known from "Mensch Markus" flew with us on this mission! The report was sent on Sunday, 5th of December 2004 at 6:45 p.m. in the german TV channel Sat1 in "Blitz am Sonntag".

Paul is being interviewed

Safety briefing

For famous people too the safety briefing is mandatory, as the picture above shows. Nevertheless not all questions seem to be cleared... because after that Paul is still a desired interview partner.

Some impressions from the Sat1-Team in weightlessness:

The camera man especially liked floating around

Paul Bierl and Markus Profitlich

Admittedly, Mr. Profitlich looked somehow pale after the flight, and really with the agreement of all participants we cut the flight short after 10 parabolas, because he seems not to be as robust as the superhero he gave his voice to (as he said himself: "As you can see, in contrast to the others I don't have my sickbag any more...").
But it could also be that the film team was not at all sad about the interruption, because as it is known, TV people are always in a hurry - so also on this morning the people from Sat1 were already on the go to their next appointment...and additionally we had begun later than planned, because of fog on the day before the airplane could only land in the morning and still had to be prepared.

Mission 21

After the excitement with the TV team this mission was now a more quiet one. We had three all normal passengers and additionally Detlef Köhler, who made pictures and videos for space-tourism.net (and stayed buckled up for that). In the meantime I was supposed to take pictures too, but after some time the accu of the digital camera which Detlef had given to me was somehow low in power - I had already taken lots of pictures with it on the mission before - and so I decided to teach the passengers some zero-g tricks. This was generally accepted with delight.

Pure joy...

Several people at once tried to glide with
elegance (in the back Paul as catcher)

As you can see, everybody had lots of fun on this flight, the atmosphere was even so good that after the 20 parabolas we got 4 extra. This was at the end receipt with lots of applause for the two excellent pilots.

We are already looking forward to many more successful missions like this one and many beaming faces of our passengers!

In the first parabola, Paul shows how it works

As photographer (l. in the back) I also
could comfortably let myself float

An excellent flight

Because of the good flying skills of the two pilots we every time reached the promised 10 s of zero-g in an additional really good quality, which was the reason why somersaults and flights through the cabin could be done with ease. Completely different from what I was used from the "Pink", no one flew into some corner involuntarily, unless he had given himself this direction of movement without intention.

Approach to Memmingen after the mission

Memmingen as a former german army base has a very long runway, as you can see very well at the approach (Picture on the left).

For me there was also something new after the missions: for the first time I didn't have to stay overnight, but could travel home on the very same day!