Last year, Mrs Fallow was working as a consultant at Red Bull's head office in Fuschle am See in Austria, and as my work is sporadic I joined her for a couple of weeks during the Summer.
Fuschle am See is a small holiday town in the Austrian mountains, sitting at one end of a lake. With a population of around 1500, it is a surprising place to be HQ of a world wide corporation, but it is the home town of the founder.
The Red Bull offices are quite stunning architecturally, and despite the flamboyant style, blend into the environment really well ( they are in fact in the above photo, but you can't see them.
Over the weekend, Mrs F and I decided to go visit Hanger 7, home of the Red Bull airforce, based at Salzburg airport. Go over the orange aerobatic smoke trail to see the porn.
Sitting on the opposite side of the airport from the main terminal (did I mention that they only have a couple of dozen commercial flights each day?), Hanger 7 is open to the public (no entry fee) and houses a large selection of Red Bull aircraft, plus a number of Formula 1, Nascar and other race cars.
All of their aircraft are airworthy and are regularly flown by Red Bull's salaried pilots. So with no more preamble, here are some of the joys.
Pride of Place
A B25 Mitchell. Great condition, but I would have preferred the original paintwork.
and sitting alongside an F4 Corsair
Other delightful planes included a Cessna SkymasterC337 pushmepullme, which was being taken out for a flight
An Alphajet
and a Suckoi 29 aerobatics plane.
Something else of interest was Felix Baumgartner's balloon module and pressure suit from his world record parachute jump. Inntersting to note was that his parachute seemed to be pretty standard, with a small piggyback set up with a three ring circus.
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My biggest regret was that one plane I really wanted to see, the P38 Lightning was that day in Hanger 8, which is not open to the public.
All said and done, a nice way to spend a couple of hours on a cloudy day.