Le Bourget 1965…… my first airshow!

At the age of 18 I made my first passenger flight in an airplane. I went on an organized trip by Fokker F-17 Friendship from the old Schiphol airport for a direct flight to Le Bourget.
Because of the poor weather, the flight from Schiphol was delayed by more than an hour. However, we finally were into the air and I could enjoy my first flight ever.

However, weather in Northern France was again not too good and we had to fly through a deep depression with a lot of turbulence. Since I had never encountered this before, I more or less thought this was ‘normal’ and I failed to understand why most of the other passengers made frequent use of the on-board paper bags. I had no idea why everybody was sick and throwing up!!
We arrived later that morning at Le Bourget and already during taxiing I saw a remarkable plane I had never seen before: a Bréguet Sahara transport plane in French Air Force colours.
Although the were some occasional showers during the rest of the day I could make nice photographs with my simple but good Ilford Sportman 35mm camera. At that age I had no financial resources for lots of 35 mm films and I only had one colour slide film; in fact a birthday present from my mother. So all I could make were 36 pictures as colour slides and unfortunately there were many more than 36 aircraft on show!

Return flight was more or less the same: bad weather with heavy turbulence; I believe I was the only passenger not being airsick….. That 1965 event was the first one of my many visits to the Le Bourget airshows over the years.

After more than 50 years, my slides still are in a reasonable condition as can be seen in the attached slideshow. Of course, cleaning up of spots and scratches and colour correction was absolutely necessary to produce good images!!

Nico Braas, 22.03.2017