Discover Top Posts Tagged with #stinson l-5

Stinson L-5 Sentinel, Oshkosh 2018

#stinson l-5 #l-5 sentinel #warbird #airplane #eaa #aviation #airventure #oshkosh

Stinson L-5 Sentinel s/n 42-98280 of the UN, or, to be more precise, of the UN’s “Balkan Committee” set up to observe the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), overflies Salonica (Thessaloniki), circa 1949. (scanned from the original postcard, based on a photo by well-known Salonica photographer Giorgos Lykidis, Grelicks collection [I actually have two, slightly different, original postcards based on the same Lykidis photo])

Following the AMFOGE, here is another quasi-forgotten foreign mission of observers in Greece in the late 1940s, during the Greek Civil War: the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) [cf. Amikam Nachmani, International Intervention in the Greek Civil War: The United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans, 1947-1952, New York, 1990.] News that the said international committee was about to receive five L-5 aircraft appeared in Greek newspapers on 12.2.1948. Two months later, the aircraft were obviously in full operation, and the Committee suffered casualties: a UN L-5 crashed during landing in Florina on 17.2.1949 – both the pilot, a US Captain, and the observer, a British Lieutenant Colonel (“of the Salonica Observers Office”) were killed.

It is NOT the first time the above photo is published: it has already appeared in Mihalis Tremopoulos’s interesting book [Μιχάλης Τρεμόπουλος, Η ιπτάμενη ιστορία της Θεσσαλονίκης, εκδ. Παρατηρητής, 2001] on the aviation history of Thessaloniki (twice! on both pg. 161 and 164!), accompanied by a second photo (pg. 163) of another UN L-5 (possibly s/n 42-98625), again flying over the Thessaloniki waterfront. [I am also aware of a 3rd photo, apparently of the same series.] Nevertheless, Tremopoulos doesn’t elaborate on the story – nor does Yiannis Terniotis, who published [Αεροπορική Ιστορία, τχ. 7, Οκτώβριος-Νοέμβριος 2000, σ. 79] a photo (credited: St. Vouros archives) of a UN L-5 in Athens Hellenikon airport (not to mention that, regrettably, he even misidentifies the aircraft as a Piper L-4…).

More recently, an absolutely fantastic photo of L-5 Sentinel s/n 42-98280 (i.e. the very aircraft of today’s post) appeared in Wikipedia: “Photo taken by USAF pilot Harry David Master (1922-1983) between 1947-1950 in Greece. Photo scan by his grandson, Brian York.”

A last detail: As you can see in these photos, the UN Balkan Committee’s L-5s were painted in silver dope finish, and featured the letters OHE (Greek for UN – as in the above) on the port side of the fuselage and ONU (French for UN) on the starboard side of the fuselage, with UN under the wing, and the aircraft’s serial number on the tail.

For @snowghoul

#UN #Thessaloniki #Stinson L-5 #Greece in the 1940s #Grelicks collection