View allAll Photos Tagged Learning_by_doing
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
After the success of the Soviet Union’s first carrier ship, the Moskva Class (Projekt 1123, also called „Кондор“/„Kondor“) cruisers in the mid 1960s, the country became more ambitious. This resulted in Project 1153 Orel (Russian: Орёл, Eagle), a planned 1970s-era Soviet program to give the Soviet Navy a true blue water aviation capability. Project Orel would have resulted in a program very similar to the aircraft carriers available to the U.S. Navy. The ship would have been about 75-80,000 tons displacement, with a nuclear power plant and carried about 70 aircraft launched via steam catapults – the first Soviet aircraft carrier that would be able to deploy fixed-wing aircraft.
Beyond this core capability, the Orel carrier was designed with a large offensive capability with the ship mounts including 24 vertical launch tubes for anti-ship cruise missiles. In the USSR it was actually classified as the "large cruiser with aircraft armament".
Anyway, the carrier needed appropriate aircraft, and in order to develop a the aircraft major design bureaus were asked to submit ideas and proposals in 1959. OKB Yakovlev and MiG responded. While Yakovlev concentrated on the Yak-36 VTOL design that could also be deployed aboard of smaller ships without catapult and arrester equipment, Mikoyan-Gurevich looked at navalized variants of existing or projected aircraft.
While land-based fighters went through a remarkable performance improvement during the 60ies, OKB MiG considered a robust aircraft with proven systems and – foremost – two engines to be the best start for the Soviet Union’s first naval fighter. “Learning by doing”, the gathered experience would then be used in a dedicated new design that would be ready in the mid 70ies when Project 1153 was ready for service, too.
Internally designated “I-SK” or “SK-01” (Samolyot Korabelniy = carrier-borne aircraft), the naval fighter was based on the MiG-19 (NATO: Farmer), which had been in production in the USSR since 1954.
Faster and more modern types like the MiG-21 were rejected for a naval conversion because of their poor take-off performance, uncertain aerodynamics in the naval environment and lack of ruggedness. The MiG-19 also offered the benefit of relatively compact dimensions, as well as a structure that would carry the desired two engines.
Several innovations had to be addresses:
- A new wing for improved low speed handling
- Improvement of the landing gear and internal structures for carrier operations
- Development of a wing folding mechanism
- Integration of arrester hook and catapult launch devices into the structure
- Protection of structure, engine and equipment from the aggressive naval environment
- Improvement of the pilot’s field of view for carrier landings
- Improved avionics, esp. for navigation
Work on the SK-01 started in 1960, and by 1962 a heavily redesigned MiG-19 was ready as a mock-up for inspection and further approval. The “new” aircraft shared the outlines with the land-based MiG-19, but the nose section was completely new and shared a certain similarity to the experimental “Aircraft SN”, a MiG-17 derivative with side air intakes and a solid nose that carried a. Unlike the latter, the cockpit had been moved forward, which offered, together with an enlarged canopy and a short nose, an excellent field of view for the pilot.
On the SK-01 the air intakes with short splitter plates were re-located to the fuselage flanks underneath the cockpit. In order to avoid gun smoke ingestion problems (and the lack of space in the nose for any equipment except for a small SRD-3 Grad gun ranging radar, coupled with an ASP-5N computing gun-sight), the SK-01’s internal armament, a pair of NR-30 cannon, was placed in the wing roots.
The wing itself was another major modification, it featured a reduced sweep of only 33° at ¼ chord angle (compared to the MiG-19’s original 55°). Four wing hardpoints, outside of the landing gear wells, could carry a modest ordnance payload, including rocket and gun pods, unguided missiles, iron bombs and up to four Vympel K-13 AAMs.
Outside of these pylons, the wings featured a folding mechanism that allowed the wing span to be reduced from 10 m to 6.5 m for stowage. The fin remained unchanged, but the stabilizers had a reduced sweep, too.
The single ventral fin of the MiG-19 gave way to a fairing for a massive, semi-retractable arrester hook, flanked by a pair of smaller fins. The landing gear was beefed up, too, with a stronger suspension. Catapult launch from deck was to be realized through expandable cables that were attached onto massive hooks under the fuselage.
The SK-01 received a “thumbs up” in March 1962 and three prototypes, powered by special Sorokin R3M-28 engines, derivatives of the MiG-19's RB-9 that were adapted to the naval environment, were created and tested until 1965, when the type – now designated MiG-SK – went through State Acceptance Trials, including simulated landing tests on an “unsinkalble carrier” dummy, a modified part of the runway at Air Base at the Western coast of the Caspian Sea. Not only flight tests were conducted at Kaspiysk, but also different layouts for landing cables were tested and optimized as well. Furthermore, on a special platform at the coast, an experimental steam catapult went through trials, even though no aircraft starts were made from it – but weights hauled out into the sea.
Anyway, the flight tests and the landing performance on the simulated carrier deck were successful, and while the MiG-SK (the machine differed from the MiG-19 so much that it was not recognized as an official MiG-19 variant) was not an outstanding combat aircraft, rather a technology carrier with field use capabilities.
The MiG-SK’s performance was good enough to earn OKB MiG an initial production run of 20 aircraft, primarily intended for training and development units, since the whole infrastructure and procedures for naval aviation from a carrier had to be developed from scratch. These machines were built at slow pace until 1968 and trials were carried out in the vicinity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The MiG-SK successfully remained hidden from the public, since the Soviet Navy did not want to give away its plans for a CTOL carrier. Spy flights of balloons and aircraft recognized the MiG-SK, but the type was mistaken as MiG-17 fighters. Consequently, no NATO codename was ever allocated.
Alas, the future of the Soviet, carrier-borne fixed wing aircraft was not bright: Laid down in in 1970, the Kiev-class aircraft carriers (also known as Project 1143 or as the Krechyet (Gyrfalcon) class) were the first class of fixed-wing aircraft carriers to be built in the Soviet Union, and they entered service, together with the Yak-38 (Forger) VTOL fighter, in 1973. This weapon system already offered a combat performance similar to the MiG-SK, and the VTOL concept rendered the need for catapult launch and deck landing capability obsolete.
OKB MiG still tried to lobby for a CTOL aircraft (in the meantime, the swing-wing MiG-23 was on the drawing board, as well as a projected, navalized multi-purpose derivative, the MiG-23K), but to no avail.
Furthermore, carrier Project 1153 was cancelled in October 1978 as being too expensive, and a program for a smaller ship called Project 11435, more V/STOL-aircraft-oriented, was developed instead; in its initial stage, a version of 65,000 tons and 52 aircraft was proposed, but eventually an even smaller ship was built in the form of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers in 1985, outfitted with a 12-degree ski-jump bow flight deck instead of using complex aircraft catapults. This CTOL carrier was finally equipped with navalized Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft – and the MiG-SK paved the early way to these shipboard fighters, especially the MiG-29K.
General characteristics:
Crew: One
Length: 13.28 m (43 ft 6 in)
Wingspan: 10.39 m (34 ft)
Height: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Wing area: 22.6 m² (242.5 ft²)
Empty weight: 5.172 kg (11,392 lb)
Max. take-off weight: 7,560 kg (16,632 lb)
Powerplant:
2× Sorokin R3M-28 turbojets afterburning turbojets, rated at 33.8 kN (7,605 lbf) each
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,145 km/h (618 knots, 711 mph) at 3,000 m (10,000 ft)
Range: 2,060 km (1,111 nmi, 1,280 mi) with drop tanks
Service ceiling: 17,500 m (57,400 ft)
Rate of climb: 180 m/s (35,425 ft/min)
Wing loading: 302.4 kg/m² (61.6 lb/ft²)
Thrust/weight: 0.86
Armament:
2x 30 mm NR-30 cannons in the wing roots with 75 RPG
4x underwing pylons, with a maximum load of 1.000 kg (2.205 lb)
The kit and its assembly:
This kitbash creation was spawned by thoughts concerning the Soviet Naval Aviation and its lack of CTOL aircraft carriers until the 1980ies and kicked-off by a CG rendition of a navalized MiG-17 from fellow member SPINNERS at whatifmodelers.com, posted a couple of months ago. I liked this idea, and at first I wanted to convert a MiG-17 with a solid nose as a dedicated carrier aircraft. But the more I thought about it and did historic research, the less probable this concept appeared to me: the MiG-17 was simply too old to match Soviet plans for a carrier ship, at least with the real world as reference.
A plausible alternative was the MiG-19, esp. with its twin-engine layout, even though the highly swept wings and the associated high start and landing speeds would be rather inappropriate for a shipborne fighter. Anyway, a MiG-21 was even less suitable, and I eventually took the Farmer as conversion basis, since it would also fit into the historic time frame between the late 60ies and the mid-70ies.
In this case, the basis is a Plastyk MiG-19 kit, one of the many Eastern European re-incarnations of the vintage KP kit. This cheap re-issue became a positive surprise, because any former raised panel and rivet details have disappeared and were replaced with sound, recessed engravings. The kit is still a bit clumsy, the walls are very thick (esp. the canopy – maybe 2mm!), but IMHO it’s a considerable improvement with acceptable fit, even though there are some sink holes and some nasty surprises (in my case, for instance, the stabilizer fins would not match with the rear fuselage at all, and you basically need putty everywhere).
Not much from the Plastyk kit was taken over, though: only the fuselage’s rear two-thirds were used, some landing gear parts as well as fin and the horizontal stabilizers. The latter were heavily modified and reduced in sweep in order to match new wings from a Hobby Boss MiG-15 (the parts were cut into three pieces each and then set back together again).
Furthermore, the complete front section from a Novo Supermarine Attacker was transplanted, because its short nose and the high cockpit are perfect parts for a carrier aircraft. The Attacker’s front end, including the air intakes, fits almost perfectly onto the round MiG-19 forward fuselage, only little body work was necessary. A complete cockpit tub and a new seat were implanted, as well as a front landing gear well and walls inside of the (otherwise empty) air intakes. The jet exhausts were drilled open, too, and afterburner dummies added. Simple jobs.
On the other side, the wings were trickier than expected. The MiG-19 kit comes with voluminous and massive wing root fairings, probably aerodynamic bodies for some area-ruling. I decided to keep them, but this caused some unexpected troubles…
The MiG-15 wings’ position, considerably further back due to the reduced sweep angle, was deduced from the relative MiG-19’s landing gear position. A lot of sculpting and body work followed, and after the wings were finally in place I recognized that the aforementioned, thick wing root fairings had reduced the wing sweep – basically not a bad thing, but with the inconvenient side effect that the original wing MiG-15 fences were not parallel to the fuselage anymore, looking rather awkward! What to do? Grrrr…. I could not leave it that way, so I scraped them away and replaced with them with four scratched substitutes (from styrene profiles), moving the outer pair towards the wing folding mechanism.
Under the wings, four new pylons were added (two from an IAI Kfir, two from a Su-22) and the ordnance gathered from the scrap box – bombs and rocket pods formerly belonged to a Kangnam/Revell Yak-38.
The landing gear was raised by ~2mm for a higher stance on the ground. The original, thick central fin was reduced in length, so that it could become a plausible attachment point for an arrester hook (also from the spares box), and a pair of splayed stabilizer fins was added as a compensation. Finally, some of the OOB air scoops were placed all round the hull and some pitots, antennae and a gun camera fairing added.
Painting and markings:
This whif was to look naval at first sight, so I referred to the early Yak-38 VTOL aircraft and their rather minimalistic paint scheme in an overall dull blue. The green underside, seen on many service aircraft, was AFAIK a (later) protective coating – an obsolete detail for a CTOL aircraft.
Hence, all upper surfaces and the fuselage were painted in a uniform “Field Blue” (Tamiya XF-50). It’s a bit dark, but I have used this unique, petrol blue tone many moons ago on a real world Kangnam Forger where it looks pretty good, and in this case the surface was furthermore shaded with Humbrol 96 and 126 after a black in wash.
For some contrast I painted the undersides of the wings and stabilizers as well as a fuselage section between the wings in a pale grey (Humbrol 167), seen on one of the Yak-38 prototypes. Not very obvious, but at least the aircraft did not end up in a boring, uniform color.
The interior was painted in blue-gray (PRU Blue, shaded with Humbrol 87) while the landing gear wells became Aluminum (Humbrol 56). The wheel discs became bright green, just in order to keep in style and as a colorful contrast, and some di-electric panels and covers became very light grey or bright green. For some color contrast, the anti-flutter weight tips on the stabilizers as well as the pylons’ front ends were painted bright red.
The markings/decals reflect the early Soviet Navy style, with simple Red Stars, large yellow tactical codes and some high contrast warning stencils, taken from the remains of a Yak-38 sheet (American Revell re-release of the Kangnam kit).
Finally, after some soot stains with graphite around the gun muzzles and the air bleed doors, the kit was sealed with a coat of semi-matt acrylic varnish and some matt accents (anti-glare panel, radomes).
A simple idea that turned out to be more complex than expected, due to the wing fence troubles. But I am happy that the Attacker nose could be so easily transplanted, it changes the MiG-19’s look considerably, as well as the wings with (much) less sweep angle.
The aircraft looks familiar, but you only recognize at second glance that it is more than just a MiG-19 with a solid nose. The thing looks pretty retro, reminds me a bit of the Supermarine Scimitar (dunno?), and IMHO it appears more Chinese than Soviet (maybe because the layout reminds a lot of the Q-5 fighter bomber)? It could even, with appropriate markings, be a Luft ’46 design?
A while ago Sally , Anna & Patty tagged me on this fun little game, I told them I would do it so here it is! :)
1. I LOVE food. I love to cook it, bake it, see it, smell it and most important of all, eat it. I love the process of finding or coming up with a recipe, buying the ingredients, mixing, chopping, boiling, baking..ahhh. It's like a meditation to me. I once read in a blog written by a nice woman named Brooke (that is all I remember, sorry) that "the kitchen is where love and alchemy meet to turn food into nourishment". I could not agree more.
2. I absolutely LOVE being a mother and wife. It is and will always be the greatest thing I have ever done.
3. I LOVE traditions. They are sacred to me. My husband and I have made a great effort in creating our own traditions in our little family as well as keeping our extended family/cultural traditions alive. For instance, we have attended every opening day game for the Houston Astros since 1999 (save for one year that we were out of the country). I love that!
4. I have a terrible memory and I am very ditzy. I also have absolutely no sense of direction. One time I got lost two streets down from our house.
5. I LOVE to dance and I am not so bad at it! I will dance pretty much anything although my favorites are salsa, merengue, flamenco, samba and belly dancing (the last two I am learning by doing Zumba, which is the greatest workout in the history of the world, amen).
6. I am extremely sentimental and I cry very easily. I try not to wear my heart on my sleeve but I fail miserably at this. One time I even cried watching an episode of The Simpsons. True story!
7. I am methodical and organized and a religious list maker. It's the only way I can function. I like a tidy home and I try to keep it that way (not easy with kids) but my purse is always a mess. Please explain this to me.
8. I talk so much and SO fast. My mouth always has trouble keeping up with my brain so I am not the greatest listener and I tend to put my foot in my mouth on a regular basis.
9. I LOVE music. All sorts. My favorite is classic rock (Rolling Stones, Stevie Nicks, Beatles, The Who, Doors, etc) . I also love movies. All kinds. Don't ever ask me what my favorite movie or song is though. This irritates me. How can you pick just ONE? I do not comprehend this.
10. Call me naive but just like Ann Frank, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." I honestly do.
The End.
En español en los comentarions
20 x 4 metre comission wall at the new Milton Keynes Academy school; painted with Eko, Feek, Xenz and 3Dom. Theme was 'learning by doing' so we naturally opted to paint the universe of the imagination and invention, with the human brain exploring it all...or something.
Props to all involved. (Best viewed as big as you can get it.)
CAPTION: "The food sovereignty movement has gained significant momentum throughout the country in recent years and is largely being led by indigenous communities."
NRCS ARTICLE 4/2020: There’s a sense of pride that comes with doing something for yourself, and growing food is a major part of being self-sustaining, healthy and whole.
A one-acre community garden on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota is connecting tribal members with the land, with food, and with their past.
“It’s about food sovereignty. It’s about having the choice of where and how you get your food, knowing how to feed yourself,” said Matte Wilson. “If that grocery store wasn’t here, would you know how to feed yourself and your family?”
Born and raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wilson is now director of the recently re-branded Sicangu Community Development Corporation (CDC) Food Sovereignty Initiative. One of its major projects is the Keya Wakpala Garden. Since moving back home in 2018, food sovereignty has played a major part of Wilson’s life.
“It is something that really excites me, something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life,” he said.
Vegetable Harvest on table
The food sovereignty movement has gained significant momentum throughout the country in recent years and is largely being led by indigenous communities. According to Wilson, you don’t have to be indigenous to appreciate delicious, locally grown foods.
“Food has the power to bring people together – it’s always been an essential part of all of our social interactions, whether or not you are Lakota,” he said.
For Keya Wakpala garden manager Ed Her Many Horses, the garden and learning how to grow food has been nothing short of trans formative.
“It’s impacted me in a lot of different ways,” he said. “It helped give me a reason to get up in the morning – it still does. There is so much to appreciate in the garden.”
But it’s more than food, he’s found. Caring for a garden fosters community. The Keya Wakpala Garden is a place where interns, volunteers, community members and children come together to work, and they take pride in the outcome.
“It’s a beacon of hope, I think,” Her Many Horses said.
The Boys and Girls Club brings kids to the garden where they can plant, pick vegetables and even harvest indigenous foods such as ceyaka, wild mint, in the nearby wetlands. They learn to identify foods as they’re grown and harvested, and follow up field work with cooking sessions. Starting with young kids, the project aims to make gardening and producing food something that’s second nature – something they’re able to pass on to future generations.
Learning by doing is key, according to Wilson.
“When they are able to see it in person and participate in the process, it is really powerful. It makes people appreciate food and agriculture more,” he said.
Foster Cournoyer-Hogan is a student at Stanford University from the Rosebud Indian Reservation who interned for the summer at the Keya Wakpala Garden. His additions to the garden plot included the signs that identified the plants with Lakota words. There was wagmu (squash), tinpsilazizi (carrots), phangi sasa (beets) and mastincatawote (lettuce).
Using the Lakota language is a way to stay connected to traditional culture. That’s especially important when children and elders visit the garden, he said.
Along with strengthening connections to culture and community, the garden is helping solve another issue on the reservation – addressing health challenges. Diabetes and diet related illness is high on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, but the produce from the garden gives people access to nourishing food.
“Our food is everything,” Cournoyer-Hogan said.
“Food is medicine,” added Wilson: “The way we treat our garden, the way we treat the land is how we treat ourselves … we take care of the land, and it takes care of us.”
The group has some expert resources when it comes to taking care of the land and the plants. Master Gardeners and university extension experts have volunteered their time and advice, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides support and funding through soil health programs.
The mission of NRCS is “helping people help the land.” That land usually refers to range land and farm acres, but the same programs and principles can apply to community gardens.
“We're trying to get people together to go back to some of the things that were important years ago to our people for self-sustainability,” said Mary Scott, a Rosebud Indian Reservation member and tribal liaison with NRCS.
Student gardner holding out herbs for the camera
The reservation’s growing environment presents some significant challenges. The garden site had been a conventional field, growing sunflowers, corn, soybeans and wheat. The heavy clay soils made it difficult to hold enough water for the garden, especially given the sloping hillside where it sits. Long, hot days would burn up the plants one day, and they next they’d be hit by torrential downpours, hail and wind.
“There are a lot of things outside of our control,” said Her Many Horses, “and that can be tough in such an extreme weather environment”
Rather than give up, however, the team has simply learned to adapt and make the most of what they have.
“We have to be really strategic about how we plan out our year to make the most of this short window,” Wilson said. “We have branched into utilizing some year-round growing structures to expand our season.”
The garden is tended with organic methods, using fish emulsion and compost for fertilizer. Local ranchers have donated hay bales – the more beaten-up and weather-worn the better. As ground cover, they help with weed control. Adding mulch or organic matter has helped break up the hard, clay soil and has been a huge asset for moisture retention as well.
We’re using a regenerative approach to agriculture,” said Her Many Horses. “We’re always trying to give back to our soil.
The garden also incorporates time-honored growing techniques of the tribal community. Produce is grown with the three sister’s method – beans, corn and squash grow in rows and benefit from one another.
“Beans help fertilize the soil by providing nitrogen,” Wilson explained. “The corn, when it grows up the stalk, the beans are able to wrap around the stalk, and the squash actually helps keep out pests and other weeds.”
7 workers talking in the garden
It’s one of many ways the garden is bringing the community back to its roots. It also brings youth and elders together, sharing a positive outlook while producing something for the whole community. It connects people with land and community, giving them knowledge to pass along wherever they go.
Sharing knowledge is a big part of the project, Scott said, because it’s how cultures and traditions are kept alive.
“Growing our own produce is very important, so that this community can become self-sustaining, not only as a people, but as a tribe,” she said.
The ultimate goal is to completely change the food system on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
“My vision is that our community becomes a food center where we have restaurants and food trucks sourcing their foods locally,” Wilson said, “and the garden is the first step to helping change our community mindset about food.”
But it goes even deeper than that.
“I hope that our community can be healthy and happy, that we can be sovereign,” said Her Many Horses. “And for us, that starts with everyone knowing where their food comes from.”
This beautiful property was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert from 1937 until his death in 1959 (age 91).
Today, it is still a school offering a professional Master of Architecture (M.Arch) degree based on the principle of "Learning by Doing". taliesin.edu/index.html
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
After the success of the Soviet Union’s first carrier ship, the Moskva Class (Projekt 1123, also called „Кондор“/„Kondor“) cruisers in the mid 1960s, the country became more ambitious. This resulted in Project 1153 Orel (Russian: Орёл, Eagle), a planned 1970s-era Soviet program to give the Soviet Navy a true blue water aviation capability. Project Orel would have resulted in a program very similar to the aircraft carriers available to the U.S. Navy. The ship would have been about 75-80,000 tons displacement, with a nuclear power plant and carried about 70 aircraft launched via steam catapults – the first Soviet aircraft carrier that would be able to deploy fixed-wing aircraft.
Beyond this core capability, the Orel carrier was designed with a large offensive capability with the ship mounts including 24 vertical launch tubes for anti-ship cruise missiles. In the USSR it was actually classified as the "large cruiser with aircraft armament".
Anyway, the carrier needed appropriate aircraft, and in order to develop a the aircraft major design bureaus were asked to submit ideas and proposals in 1959. OKB Yakovlev and MiG responded. While Yakovlev concentrated on the Yak-36 VTOL design that could also be deployed aboard of smaller ships without catapult and arrester equipment, Mikoyan-Gurevich looked at navalized variants of existing or projected aircraft.
While land-based fighters went through a remarkable performance improvement during the 60ies, OKB MiG considered a robust aircraft with proven systems and – foremost – two engines to be the best start for the Soviet Union’s first naval fighter. “Learning by doing”, the gathered experience would then be used in a dedicated new design that would be ready in the mid 70ies when Project 1153 was ready for service, too.
Internally designated “I-SK” or “SK-01” (Samolyot Korabelniy = carrier-borne aircraft), the naval fighter was based on the MiG-19 (NATO: Farmer), which had been in production in the USSR since 1954.
Faster and more modern types like the MiG-21 were rejected for a naval conversion because of their poor take-off performance, uncertain aerodynamics in the naval environment and lack of ruggedness. The MiG-19 also offered the benefit of relatively compact dimensions, as well as a structure that would carry the desired two engines.
Several innovations had to be addresses:
- A new wing for improved low speed handling
- Improvement of the landing gear and internal structures for carrier operations
- Development of a wing folding mechanism
- Integration of arrester hook and catapult launch devices into the structure
- Protection of structure, engine and equipment from the aggressive naval environment
- Improvement of the pilot’s field of view for carrier landings
- Improved avionics, esp. for navigation
Work on the SK-01 started in 1960, and by 1962 a heavily redesigned MiG-19 was ready as a mock-up for inspection and further approval. The “new” aircraft shared the outlines with the land-based MiG-19, but the nose section was completely new and shared a certain similarity to the experimental “Aircraft SN”, a MiG-17 derivative with side air intakes and a solid nose that carried a. Unlike the latter, the cockpit had been moved forward, which offered, together with an enlarged canopy and a short nose, an excellent field of view for the pilot.
On the SK-01 the air intakes with short splitter plates were re-located to the fuselage flanks underneath the cockpit. In order to avoid gun smoke ingestion problems (and the lack of space in the nose for any equipment except for a small SRD-3 Grad gun ranging radar, coupled with an ASP-5N computing gun-sight), the SK-01’s internal armament, a pair of NR-30 cannon, was placed in the wing roots.
The wing itself was another major modification, it featured a reduced sweep of only 33° at ¼ chord angle (compared to the MiG-19’s original 55°). Four wing hardpoints, outside of the landing gear wells, could carry a modest ordnance payload, including rocket and gun pods, unguided missiles, iron bombs and up to four Vympel K-13 AAMs.
Outside of these pylons, the wings featured a folding mechanism that allowed the wing span to be reduced from 10 m to 6.5 m for stowage. The fin remained unchanged, but the stabilizers had a reduced sweep, too.
The single ventral fin of the MiG-19 gave way to a fairing for a massive, semi-retractable arrester hook, flanked by a pair of smaller fins. The landing gear was beefed up, too, with a stronger suspension. Catapult launch from deck was to be realized through expandable cables that were attached onto massive hooks under the fuselage.
The SK-01 received a “thumbs up” in March 1962 and three prototypes, powered by special Sorokin R3M-28 engines, derivatives of the MiG-19's RB-9 that were adapted to the naval environment, were created and tested until 1965, when the type – now designated MiG-SK – went through State Acceptance Trials, including simulated landing tests on an “unsinkalble carrier” dummy, a modified part of the runway at Air Base at the Western coast of the Caspian Sea. Not only flight tests were conducted at Kaspiysk, but also different layouts for landing cables were tested and optimized as well. Furthermore, on a special platform at the coast, an experimental steam catapult went through trials, even though no aircraft starts were made from it – but weights hauled out into the sea.
Anyway, the flight tests and the landing performance on the simulated carrier deck were successful, and while the MiG-SK (the machine differed from the MiG-19 so much that it was not recognized as an official MiG-19 variant) was not an outstanding combat aircraft, rather a technology carrier with field use capabilities.
The MiG-SK’s performance was good enough to earn OKB MiG an initial production run of 20 aircraft, primarily intended for training and development units, since the whole infrastructure and procedures for naval aviation from a carrier had to be developed from scratch. These machines were built at slow pace until 1968 and trials were carried out in the vicinity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The MiG-SK successfully remained hidden from the public, since the Soviet Navy did not want to give away its plans for a CTOL carrier. Spy flights of balloons and aircraft recognized the MiG-SK, but the type was mistaken as MiG-17 fighters. Consequently, no NATO codename was ever allocated.
Alas, the future of the Soviet, carrier-borne fixed wing aircraft was not bright: Laid down in in 1970, the Kiev-class aircraft carriers (also known as Project 1143 or as the Krechyet (Gyrfalcon) class) were the first class of fixed-wing aircraft carriers to be built in the Soviet Union, and they entered service, together with the Yak-38 (Forger) VTOL fighter, in 1973. This weapon system already offered a combat performance similar to the MiG-SK, and the VTOL concept rendered the need for catapult launch and deck landing capability obsolete.
OKB MiG still tried to lobby for a CTOL aircraft (in the meantime, the swing-wing MiG-23 was on the drawing board, as well as a projected, navalized multi-purpose derivative, the MiG-23K), but to no avail.
Furthermore, carrier Project 1153 was cancelled in October 1978 as being too expensive, and a program for a smaller ship called Project 11435, more V/STOL-aircraft-oriented, was developed instead; in its initial stage, a version of 65,000 tons and 52 aircraft was proposed, but eventually an even smaller ship was built in the form of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers in 1985, outfitted with a 12-degree ski-jump bow flight deck instead of using complex aircraft catapults. This CTOL carrier was finally equipped with navalized Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft – and the MiG-SK paved the early way to these shipboard fighters, especially the MiG-29K.
General characteristics:
Crew: One
Length: 13.28 m (43 ft 6 in)
Wingspan: 10.39 m (34 ft)
Height: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Wing area: 22.6 m² (242.5 ft²)
Empty weight: 5.172 kg (11,392 lb)
Max. take-off weight: 7,560 kg (16,632 lb)
Powerplant:
2× Sorokin R3M-28 turbojets afterburning turbojets, rated at 33.8 kN (7,605 lbf) each
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,145 km/h (618 knots, 711 mph) at 3,000 m (10,000 ft)
Range: 2,060 km (1,111 nmi, 1,280 mi) with drop tanks
Service ceiling: 17,500 m (57,400 ft)
Rate of climb: 180 m/s (35,425 ft/min)
Wing loading: 302.4 kg/m² (61.6 lb/ft²)
Thrust/weight: 0.86
Armament:
2x 30 mm NR-30 cannons in the wing roots with 75 RPG
4x underwing pylons, with a maximum load of 1.000 kg (2.205 lb)
The kit and its assembly:
This kitbash creation was spawned by thoughts concerning the Soviet Naval Aviation and its lack of CTOL aircraft carriers until the 1980ies and kicked-off by a CG rendition of a navalized MiG-17 from fellow member SPINNERS at whatifmodelers.com, posted a couple of months ago. I liked this idea, and at first I wanted to convert a MiG-17 with a solid nose as a dedicated carrier aircraft. But the more I thought about it and did historic research, the less probable this concept appeared to me: the MiG-17 was simply too old to match Soviet plans for a carrier ship, at least with the real world as reference.
A plausible alternative was the MiG-19, esp. with its twin-engine layout, even though the highly swept wings and the associated high start and landing speeds would be rather inappropriate for a shipborne fighter. Anyway, a MiG-21 was even less suitable, and I eventually took the Farmer as conversion basis, since it would also fit into the historic time frame between the late 60ies and the mid-70ies.
In this case, the basis is a Plastyk MiG-19 kit, one of the many Eastern European re-incarnations of the vintage KP kit. This cheap re-issue became a positive surprise, because any former raised panel and rivet details have disappeared and were replaced with sound, recessed engravings. The kit is still a bit clumsy, the walls are very thick (esp. the canopy – maybe 2mm!), but IMHO it’s a considerable improvement with acceptable fit, even though there are some sink holes and some nasty surprises (in my case, for instance, the stabilizer fins would not match with the rear fuselage at all, and you basically need putty everywhere).
Not much from the Plastyk kit was taken over, though: only the fuselage’s rear two-thirds were used, some landing gear parts as well as fin and the horizontal stabilizers. The latter were heavily modified and reduced in sweep in order to match new wings from a Hobby Boss MiG-15 (the parts were cut into three pieces each and then set back together again).
Furthermore, the complete front section from a Novo Supermarine Attacker was transplanted, because its short nose and the high cockpit are perfect parts for a carrier aircraft. The Attacker’s front end, including the air intakes, fits almost perfectly onto the round MiG-19 forward fuselage, only little body work was necessary. A complete cockpit tub and a new seat were implanted, as well as a front landing gear well and walls inside of the (otherwise empty) air intakes. The jet exhausts were drilled open, too, and afterburner dummies added. Simple jobs.
On the other side, the wings were trickier than expected. The MiG-19 kit comes with voluminous and massive wing root fairings, probably aerodynamic bodies for some area-ruling. I decided to keep them, but this caused some unexpected troubles…
The MiG-15 wings’ position, considerably further back due to the reduced sweep angle, was deduced from the relative MiG-19’s landing gear position. A lot of sculpting and body work followed, and after the wings were finally in place I recognized that the aforementioned, thick wing root fairings had reduced the wing sweep – basically not a bad thing, but with the inconvenient side effect that the original wing MiG-15 fences were not parallel to the fuselage anymore, looking rather awkward! What to do? Grrrr…. I could not leave it that way, so I scraped them away and replaced with them with four scratched substitutes (from styrene profiles), moving the outer pair towards the wing folding mechanism.
Under the wings, four new pylons were added (two from an IAI Kfir, two from a Su-22) and the ordnance gathered from the scrap box – bombs and rocket pods formerly belonged to a Kangnam/Revell Yak-38.
The landing gear was raised by ~2mm for a higher stance on the ground. The original, thick central fin was reduced in length, so that it could become a plausible attachment point for an arrester hook (also from the spares box), and a pair of splayed stabilizer fins was added as a compensation. Finally, some of the OOB air scoops were placed all round the hull and some pitots, antennae and a gun camera fairing added.
Painting and markings:
This whif was to look naval at first sight, so I referred to the early Yak-38 VTOL aircraft and their rather minimalistic paint scheme in an overall dull blue. The green underside, seen on many service aircraft, was AFAIK a (later) protective coating – an obsolete detail for a CTOL aircraft.
Hence, all upper surfaces and the fuselage were painted in a uniform “Field Blue” (Tamiya XF-50). It’s a bit dark, but I have used this unique, petrol blue tone many moons ago on a real world Kangnam Forger where it looks pretty good, and in this case the surface was furthermore shaded with Humbrol 96 and 126 after a black in wash.
For some contrast I painted the undersides of the wings and stabilizers as well as a fuselage section between the wings in a pale grey (Humbrol 167), seen on one of the Yak-38 prototypes. Not very obvious, but at least the aircraft did not end up in a boring, uniform color.
The interior was painted in blue-gray (PRU Blue, shaded with Humbrol 87) while the landing gear wells became Aluminum (Humbrol 56). The wheel discs became bright green, just in order to keep in style and as a colorful contrast, and some di-electric panels and covers became very light grey or bright green. For some color contrast, the anti-flutter weight tips on the stabilizers as well as the pylons’ front ends were painted bright red.
The markings/decals reflect the early Soviet Navy style, with simple Red Stars, large yellow tactical codes and some high contrast warning stencils, taken from the remains of a Yak-38 sheet (American Revell re-release of the Kangnam kit).
Finally, after some soot stains with graphite around the gun muzzles and the air bleed doors, the kit was sealed with a coat of semi-matt acrylic varnish and some matt accents (anti-glare panel, radomes).
A simple idea that turned out to be more complex than expected, due to the wing fence troubles. But I am happy that the Attacker nose could be so easily transplanted, it changes the MiG-19’s look considerably, as well as the wings with (much) less sweep angle.
The aircraft looks familiar, but you only recognize at second glance that it is more than just a MiG-19 with a solid nose. The thing looks pretty retro, reminds me a bit of the Supermarine Scimitar (dunno?), and IMHO it appears more Chinese than Soviet (maybe because the layout reminds a lot of the Q-5 fighter bomber)? It could even, with appropriate markings, be a Luft ’46 design?
Note: this photo was published in an undated (Jun 2010) Everyblock NYC blog, titled "1-52 block of E. 77th St." It was also published in an Aug 24, 2010 blog titled "iPad, el iPad convierte a los ancianos en clientes de Apple," at www-dot-tuexperto-dot-com/2010/08/24/ipad-el-ipad-convierte-a-los-ancianos-en-clientes-de-apple/ (sorry for the laborious quasi-URL there, but Flickr choked when I tried to give it the "real" URL and turn it into a hyperlink). And it was published in a Nov 4, 2010 blog titled "Du consommateur au superconsommateur."
Note: a reversed, "ghost" form of the old man in this photo was published as part of a mashup in an undated (late Feb 2012) blog titled "Learning by Doing - Digital Images (Basic Part 2)." The photo was also published in an Apr 28, 2012 blog titled "Appleは、iOS5で「Mac予備軍」の獲得に成功した." And it was published in a May 27, 2012 blog titled " Ces baby boomers qui adoptent des lecteurs ebook." It was also published in an Oct 11, 2012 blog titled "Apple finds and bottles the fountain of youth. The Ultimate App." And it was published in a Dec 11, 2012 blog titled "UK : une réforme du droit d'auteur est-elle envisageable?"
****************************************
When the weather is nice on a holiday weekend, you can be reasonably sure that there will be lots of interesting people to photograph in Central Park. My typical plan, on such photo expeditions, is to walk through and around several different parts of the park -- in order to see different groups of people, and also to take advantage of different scenes and backdrops. But it means that I don't spend very much time in any one place, and most of my shots end up being "ad hoc" in nature, with almost no planning, preparation, framing, or composition.
On this Memorial Day weekend, I decided to restrict my wandering to just one area -- the "Great Lawn" that's more-or-less in the center of the north-south expanse of the park. I walked around the sidewalk perimeter of the large grassy area, starting at the north end (because I had entered the park at 86th Street), heading down to the south end by the Delacorte Theater and the Belvedere Castle, and then back north again to my starting point.
I had a 70-300mm zoom lens on my camera while I was walking, and while that made it relatively easy to capture some interesting scenes of people out in the middle of the lawn, it was almost impossible to take a quick picture of someone just a couple feet away from me. Normally, I would just shrug and mutter to myself, "Well, that's the way it goes" -- and perhaps resolve that, next time, I would use the 18-200mm zoom lens that covers both a wider range between wide-angle and telephoto.
But in this case, I decided to change lenses after the first circumnavigation, and then make a second circle around the Great Lawn with a 24-120mm zoom lens. (All of this involved full-frame lenses on the Nikon D700, rather than the half-frame DX 18-200 zoom lens on my older Nikon D300.) So, on the second walk around the lawn, I focused more on the people sitting on benches, walking past me, and stretched out on the grass near the sidewalk. It also gave me a chance to set the lens to its maximum wide-angle setting, and take advantage of quick, unfocused, wide-angle "hip shots" whenever there was something interesting nearby that I had to shoot quickly.
When I got home, I decided to take a quick look at the Wikipedia article about the Great Lawn, to see if there was anything special that I needed to mention in these notes. I didn't expect to find much, because -- as far as I knew -- it had always been part of Central Park, and had always been the same. To my surprise, I found that that was definitely not not the case. Indeed, today's Great Lawn is situated on a flat area that was occupied by the 35-acre "Lower Reservoir" that was constructed in 1842 to supply water to the residents of the city. After the Croton-Catskill reservoir system was completed, the Lower Reservoir became redundant -- but political battles ensued for several decades before the city finally settled on a plan for an oval lawn.
That plan basically fell apart because of the Depression, and the open area was filled with a "Hooverville" of improvised shacks for quite some time. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia finally brought in the legendary Robert Moses (the visionary force behind so many other parks around New York City and the rest of the state) to implement the plan -- and it was essentially finished in 1934.
And there's more to the history, too, but I'll let you read that on your own if you're interested. (You might be interested to know, for example, that in 1995, Pope John Paul II held an open-air mass for 125,000 on the Great Lawn. Yes, it is that big!)
In any case, I finished my second loop around the park, went home and uploaded several hundred photos, which I've winnowed down to the ones you'll find in this set...
"SWFLN welcomes our newest staff member, Lee LeBlanc, Continuing Education/Emerging Technologies Coordinator. Lee comes to us from Florida Gulf Coast University, where he was most recently a Senior Library Technical Assistant for the Computing and Public Service Departments. He is currently a graduate student at Florida State University’s College of Information and a frequent guest-blogger for Michael Stephens’ blog, Tame the Web. Welcome, Lee!"
Just had my first medium format film developed-here are my thoughts in reverse order:_
getting it developed at Oxford Snappy Snaps was an expensive option but I was impatient to see it
I was amazed anything was on the film as it expired in summer 2005 !!!
I have never tried a medium format camera before and its quite difficult !
My eyesight is SO bad I should have gone to Specsavers
I must remember to write down what settings I use
I must buy a lightmeter as using this without one is like a blindman up an alley without his guide dog
I must learn more abt my Epson V500 scanner as its taken an hour to scan 2 negs as it kept chopping each into 2 because I had it set on 6/4 instead of 6/7 !
Learning by doing and experimenting is a good way to learn
and finally please dont tell me I should set up a home darkroom-there isnt space or money or the inclination for any of that --in future I will amass a batch of films and send them off to a very nice lab I have heard about
Mamiya RZ67
Sekor 110mm lens
tripod
Kodak Portra 400 NC-expired 2005
scanned Epson V500
I had fun taking some close up and macro shots last night, really with the aim of learning by doing after reading/watching several speedlight tutorials yesterday. I think I am gradually understanding what I've been watching but still need much more practice!
My spoon shots are inspired by the many different ones I've seen on Flickr. Here's one of them. I used what I had to hand, in this case a roll of wrapping paper.
@ Sonia Mourão - hahahahaha, quem dera! Mas uma pena q eu esteja a anos luz disso. Talvez em uma outra encarnação... : ) Mas obrigada pelo carinho assim mesmo, amiga! : )
Today I tried to play a little bit with the lighting of a traffic light. Nothing special but nearly that what I expected…learning by doing ;-)
Original Image Credit: Nice Portrait of Tween Girl by pictureYouth
www.flickr.com/photos/45688888@N08/7705758106/
Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on September 26, 2012
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/legalcode
Quote from Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work
go.solution-tree.com/plcbooks/Reproducibles_LBD2nd.html
Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree
2010
Slide by Bill Ferriter
The Tempered Radical
@plugusin
Mission Hospital Quetta was one of the 1st hospitals to be established at Quetta in 1886.IT WAS RUN BY Church Mission Society (CMS) '' CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY . One of its very 1st incharge was dr Henry Holland , who later was to be always assocated with it, not only just because of spending most of his life serving there but due to being instrumental in its expansion and great success. During the 1935 Quetta earthquake he was the chief medical officer of Baluchistan.
Dr. HENRY HOLLAND had offered his services to the Church Missionary Society shortly after graduation and, in March 1900, still with four months left of his contract as Traveling Secretary, he was called to Quetta, on the remote North-West Frontier of India, to take the place of the doctor shortly going on leave. He had three weeks to prepare for his journey to a place he had never heard of.
Traveling by cramped third class overland to Marseilles, he continued on by sea in an airless lower berth, such as was allotted to second class passengers at the turn of the century. A typhoid inoculation beyond Port Said made him severely ill, and he suffered a virulent attack of the fever seven months after reaching Quetta. From Karachi, he completed the last 400 miles by train, climbing from the dust-thickened air over the Sind desert and plains, through the desolate Baluchistan hills to the upland plateau where Quetta stands, ringed by towering peaks, 5,500 feet above sea level. As he left the plains he began to see large, fierce-looking tribesmen who seemed a piece with the harsh surroundings. His first sight of the city-oasis that was to be his home was memorable—arriving on the 6th of May, the weary traveler delighted in the greenness and profusion of blooming roses.
The medical mission at Quetta, established 14 years earlier, was one of a chain of four along the North-West Frontier originally encouraged by British army and political officers to help keep peace among the tribesmen as well as treat their physical ills. To the first outpatient building constructed in 1889, had been added four wards with 28 beds for inpatients, one operating room and a dark room for ophthalmoscopic work. It was a small but brave assertion of Christian care and compassion in the heart of a hostile land, for killing an infidel as a way to attain Paradise was common practice among fanatical Muslims in those early days.
The Frontier it served was a bleak and isolated land of rugged mountains and great stretches of arid, rocky plains. Apart from the railway to Quetta, there were few roads and only rough trails across the wastelands and through the passes. Excepting the British garrison and government officers at Quetta and the few other stations, the inhabitants were mostly scattered tribespeople who changed their dwellings with the season. Separated by deserts and mountain ranges, the various tribes seldom mixed together. Education in a formal sense was unknown, and there was little desire for schooling among those living in or near the Frontier stations to whom it was available.
Dr. HOLLAND found the hospital in full swing; spring and autumn were the busiest, when caravans could move without hindrance of snow and freezing temperatures or the intolerable summer heat. Among the patients were small-statured Brahui, of supposed Dravidian stock, who came in droves after their winter sojourn to the plains south of Sibi on their way back to the uplands. Tall, hardy Pathans, the Afghan tribes living on the then British side of the border, came down from the mountains to the north. A Pushtu-speaking Semitic people, they claimed descent from the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Baluchi arrived as the weather warmed, from the southern foothills and plains running east from Sibi to the Punjabi frontier. Also a Semitic people and often of fine physique, their language was a form of Persian. Journeying up from the plains were Sindhis and Punjabis.
The doctor was not put off by the Muslim fanaticism, blood feuding and raiding that characterized a part of the tribesmen's way of life. Seeing their strength in adversity and the obvious need for medical attention, he quickly took up the challenge of adjusting to life in entirely strange surroundings.
Work for the young medical graduate began at once. Dysentery and malaria were common ills. Surgical needs were great though limited facilities permitted treatment mostly of hemorrhoids, tubercular glands and cataracts. As he had not had hospital experience, he spent several hours each day working with the doctor he was soon to replace, learning surgical technique. Otherwise learning by doing, he was soon administering treatment for all manner of ailments. Later, he was able to widen his knowledge through visits to hospitals in Kashmir, the Punjab and Sind.
By adhering to a rigorous daily regimen of work and study, he passed examinations in Urdu, Persian and Pushtu and mastered the rudiments of Brahui, Baluchi, Punjabi and Sindhi. Whenever the hospital work slackened, the adventurous doctor made treks into the outlying countryside, sometimes hunting and always learning more about the lives of the tribespeople and their medical needs. Cataracts and eye infections were endemic to the area, induced by glaring heat, searing winds, dust, flies, vitamin deficiency in the diet and calcium-laden water. Perhaps because the plight of the blind touched him most, he developed a special talent for eye surgery. On his return to Quetta in 1907, after a serious illness had necessitated an extended leave, he was given charge of the medical mission.
In the autumn of 1909, a wealthy Hindu merchant and philanthropist invited Dr. HOLLAND to spend the winter weeks treating patients at Shikarpur, in North Sind, offering to cover all expenses. The doctor and his two colleagues refused payment for their services, but agreed to return if the merchant would provide a building for their operative work. The small hospital that was ready the following year has now grown into one of the largest eye clinics in the world, able to care for 600 patients at a time. Though some other surgical cases are treated, the main work is ophthalmic.
Since 1920, some 150 eye specialists have come from India, Pakistan, the Continent, the United Kingdom and the United States to observe and work at Shikarpur. They pay their own traveling expenses and board and room for the privilege of working there. In a mutually beneficial exchange, the visiting doctors have brought the latest developments in surgical technique and themselves had valuable operative experience, performing up to 200 cataract operations in a month's stay, whereas two or three a week would be the average in most clinics elsewhere. Other medical missionaries also have come each year to join in the work. This outside help has meant that four doctors could each operate six hours a day. With such teamwork, as many as 3,000 operations have been performed during one two-month season at Shikarpur, of which 1,400 were for cataracts.
A second clinic was later established at Khairpur, also in North Sind, and for a time a clinic was operated for a few weeks each year in Karachi under the auspices of the Poor Patients' Relief Society. As other doctors joined the mission, stations were set up in the surrounding countryside to which medical and nursing staff were regularly assigned.
The main base was still Quetta, and the hospital there grew steadily, chiefly due to the increase of eye work. Facilities were better adapted to local custom with the addition of wards where patients could be accompanied by relatives with cooking pots. Between 1904 and 1930, 14 such wards were built for patients who would rather pay a rupee a day than go into a public ward; all were the gifts of grateful patients. Similar accommodations for very poor families were provided free. Patients often came from long distances, and to have their relatives with them during convalescence with a family camel, donkey or goat in the courtyard was a natural arrangement they appreciated.
The tradition of service was strengthened at Quetta by the building of a Christian nursing profession and the institution, in 1926, of a full-fledged training program for male nurses. From 1931, the mission hospital also trained a succession of dispensers. An X-ray unit had been purchased, in 1925, with donations from local sirdars and chieftains. By 1934, the number of beds had been increased to 124 and that year inpatients numbered 3,447 and major operations totalled 3,760. With the exercise of much faith and patience in a Muslim environment, old suspicion and distrust had given way to confidence, notably regarding surgery.
All of this painstakingly built physical plant was destroyed, in May 1935, when a disastrous earthquake laid Quetta in ruins, killing some 25,000 people in the city and environs. After five days in a hospital recuperating from a back injury sustained when he was pinned under falling beams, Dr. HOLLAND was appointed Chief Medical Officer of Baluchistan, in charge of rescue work, making provision for casualties and prevention of epidemics. This task completed, the intrepid doctor then faced the problem of reconstruction. "Striking while the iron was hot," he made a trip to England to raise funds. Other support for the Rebuilding Fund came from not then partitioned India. Temporary structures were in operation in 1936 and two years later the first permanent buildings went up. The new hospital was completed on the same site on May 6, 1940, 40 years from the day of his first arrival at Quetta.
In 1936, the doctor had been made a Knight-Bachelor in recognition of the work of the mission hospital and his contribution to ophthalmology. He had previously received the decoration of the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal and bar and, in 1929, the Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (C.I.E.) in tribute of his service to the tribespeople of Baluchistan.
His medical work on the Frontier meanwhile was becoming a family affair. Effie Tunbridge, the second nursing sister to join the Quetta mission became Dr. HOLLAND's wife four years later in 1910. Their elder son, Harry, joined his father in 1935. The second son, RONALD, born in Quetta in 1914, followed suit in 1940, after completing his medical training at Edinburgh. Marriage interrupted the plans of their daughter, Esme, also to serve on the Frontier. RONALD's wife, Joan, has carried on as a nurse, keeping hospital accounts and becoming an expert anesthetist though, stricken with paralytic polio a year after their marriage in 1940, she has the full use of only one arm and is unable to walk. When malaria, contracted marching through the Burma jungle in wartime, continued to undermine his health, Harry returned to England and, in 1953, started the Oversea Service, a pioneer venture under the auspices of the British Council of Churches and the Conference of British Missionary Societies to spread a sense of Christian responsibility among laymen going to assignments abroad. RONALD has taken his father's place in charge of the medical mission work in Pakistan. Excelling also in general surgery, he is recognized as the most skillful ophthalmic surgeon of the family. He has learned the many languages of Baluchistan and otherwise has carried on unbroken his father's legacy of compassionate service. Though even more patients than in his father's time are treated during the crowded winter months at Shikarpur and Khairpur and during the spring and autumn at Quetta, Dr. RONALD HOLLAND continues to visit the outlying areas. Setting up mobile clinics along the way he, too, performs delicate eye operations and treats assorted other ailments for poor tribespeople to whom no other help is available.
In treating the thousands who come each year to their hospitals and clinics the HOLLANDS developed mass operative techniques that have relevance for surgeons elsewhere who may be called upon to meet large-scale disasters. Where it was no uncommon experience to see 200 to 300 outpatients a day, the choice was made to forego elaborate treatment for a few and take care of as many as possible. Both father and son have done up to 70 cataract operations a day. Records were not as detailed as they would like, but each patient was recorded as to diagnosis, treatment, operation, operator, complications and result. Methods were simplified to the extreme, but the essential preoperative technique has been maintained and postoperative care adapted to the resources available and the mores of the people, proving, for example, that a cataract case can move about within hours after surgery without harmful effect. Despite severe handicaps, these careful adjustments to field conditions have produced excellent results. Though the Shikarpur clinic operates only two months each year, it can record more than 150,000 eye operations, including 80,000 cataract extractions of which 97 per cent have proved successful.
Feeling that the scientific part of their work should be brought before the profession, both Sir HENRY and Dr. RONALD HOLLAND have contributed articles to leading medical journals in India, Britain and the United States and read papers at the Oxford Ophthalmic Congress.
Following partition in 1947, Quetta and Shikarpur fell within the borders of West Pakistan. The hospitals helped through the difficult period of adjustment and now are continuing their good work. Beside the goodwill among the people and the tribal chieftains, based on trust, has been a growing appreciation of the Christian qualities of concern and integrity for which the hospitals have stood through the years.
Sir HENRY's retirement, due according to the rules of his mission society in 1940, was postponed for the duration of World War II and again delayed until conditions were settled enough for him to hand over to his sons and his Pakistani Christian assistant. In those postwar years, he served on Government Commissions, on Church and Mission councils and committees, sharing in the planning of medical policy both for the Church and the Government of India.
Finally leaving active service in March 1948, he was promptly called back again to treat the King of Afghanistan. Two years later and until his own eyesight began to fail in 1956, grateful tribesmen, led by a Baluch chief, made up a purse to pay his traveling expenses for an annual visit to his hospitals. During the remainder of those years, he traversed England raising funds, recruiting missionaries and encouraging young people to think less of themselves and more of service to others. Now 85, he came to Pakistan again this year to celebrate his golden jubilee among his beloved tribespeople.
Simple and unassuming in manner, this father and son bely their splendid record as two of the world's foremost eye surgeons. Both have been offered professional opportunities with high standing and handsome stipends but have chosen to devote their skills as medical missionaries among an isolated people. Of those who come to work or be treated at their hospitals, no question is asked as to their faith, but the doctors' own lives are a continual Christian challenge to all who know them.
Each day's work is preceded by prayer. In operating for hours on end visitors, too, have sensed the therapeutic value of the spiritual atmosphere thus created. To the HOLLANDS, prayer and healing go together, for healing to them "speaks" the same message as Christ's teaching—the love of God in whose sight every individual is important.
August 1960
Manila
REFERENCES:
Holland, Sir Henry, Frontier Doctor. London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1958. (Much of the above statement has been taken from this source with the author's permission.)
Hall, Clarence W. "He's Given Sight to 100,000." Reprinted from Reader's Digest, March, 1957.
Letters and articles by doctors in the United States who have visited Shikarpur.
Articles appearing in the Karachi press.
Interviews with persons in Karachi and at Shikarpur acquainted with the Hollands and their medical mission work.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
After the success of the Soviet Union’s first carrier ship, the Moskva Class (Projekt 1123, also called „Кондор“/„Kondor“) cruisers in the mid 1960s, the country became more ambitious. This resulted in Project 1153 Orel (Russian: Орёл, Eagle), a planned 1970s-era Soviet program to give the Soviet Navy a true blue water aviation capability. Project Orel would have resulted in a program very similar to the aircraft carriers available to the U.S. Navy. The ship would have been about 75-80,000 tons displacement, with a nuclear power plant and carried about 70 aircraft launched via steam catapults – the first Soviet aircraft carrier that would be able to deploy fixed-wing aircraft.
Beyond this core capability, the Orel carrier was designed with a large offensive capability with the ship mounts including 24 vertical launch tubes for anti-ship cruise missiles. In the USSR it was actually classified as the "large cruiser with aircraft armament".
Anyway, the carrier needed appropriate aircraft, and in order to develop a the aircraft major design bureaus were asked to submit ideas and proposals in 1959. OKB Yakovlev and MiG responded. While Yakovlev concentrated on the Yak-36 VTOL design that could also be deployed aboard of smaller ships without catapult and arrester equipment, Mikoyan-Gurevich looked at navalized variants of existing or projected aircraft.
While land-based fighters went through a remarkable performance improvement during the 60ies, OKB MiG considered a robust aircraft with proven systems and – foremost – two engines to be the best start for the Soviet Union’s first naval fighter. “Learning by doing”, the gathered experience would then be used in a dedicated new design that would be ready in the mid 70ies when Project 1153 was ready for service, too.
Internally designated “I-SK” or “SK-01” (Samolyot Korabelniy = carrier-borne aircraft), the naval fighter was based on the MiG-19 (NATO: Farmer), which had been in production in the USSR since 1954.
Faster and more modern types like the MiG-21 were rejected for a naval conversion because of their poor take-off performance, uncertain aerodynamics in the naval environment and lack of ruggedness. The MiG-19 also offered the benefit of relatively compact dimensions, as well as a structure that would carry the desired two engines.
Several innovations had to be addresses:
- A new wing for improved low speed handling
- Improvement of the landing gear and internal structures for carrier operations
- Development of a wing folding mechanism
- Integration of arrester hook and catapult launch devices into the structure
- Protection of structure, engine and equipment from the aggressive naval environment
- Improvement of the pilot’s field of view for carrier landings
- Improved avionics, esp. for navigation
Work on the SK-01 started in 1960, and by 1962 a heavily redesigned MiG-19 was ready as a mock-up for inspection and further approval. The “new” aircraft shared the outlines with the land-based MiG-19, but the nose section was completely new and shared a certain similarity to the experimental “Aircraft SN”, a MiG-17 derivative with side air intakes and a solid nose that carried a. Unlike the latter, the cockpit had been moved forward, which offered, together with an enlarged canopy and a short nose, an excellent field of view for the pilot.
On the SK-01 the air intakes with short splitter plates were re-located to the fuselage flanks underneath the cockpit. In order to avoid gun smoke ingestion problems (and the lack of space in the nose for any equipment except for a small SRD-3 Grad gun ranging radar, coupled with an ASP-5N computing gun-sight), the SK-01’s internal armament, a pair of NR-30 cannon, was placed in the wing roots.
The wing itself was another major modification, it featured a reduced sweep of only 33° at ¼ chord angle (compared to the MiG-19’s original 55°). Four wing hardpoints, outside of the landing gear wells, could carry a modest ordnance payload, including rocket and gun pods, unguided missiles, iron bombs and up to four Vympel K-13 AAMs.
Outside of these pylons, the wings featured a folding mechanism that allowed the wing span to be reduced from 10 m to 6.5 m for stowage. The fin remained unchanged, but the stabilizers had a reduced sweep, too.
The single ventral fin of the MiG-19 gave way to a fairing for a massive, semi-retractable arrester hook, flanked by a pair of smaller fins. The landing gear was beefed up, too, with a stronger suspension. Catapult launch from deck was to be realized through expandable cables that were attached onto massive hooks under the fuselage.
The SK-01 received a “thumbs up” in March 1962 and three prototypes, powered by special Sorokin R3M-28 engines, derivatives of the MiG-19's RB-9 that were adapted to the naval environment, were created and tested until 1965, when the type – now designated MiG-SK – went through State Acceptance Trials, including simulated landing tests on an “unsinkalble carrier” dummy, a modified part of the runway at Air Base at the Western coast of the Caspian Sea. Not only flight tests were conducted at Kaspiysk, but also different layouts for landing cables were tested and optimized as well. Furthermore, on a special platform at the coast, an experimental steam catapult went through trials, even though no aircraft starts were made from it – but weights hauled out into the sea.
Anyway, the flight tests and the landing performance on the simulated carrier deck were successful, and while the MiG-SK (the machine differed from the MiG-19 so much that it was not recognized as an official MiG-19 variant) was not an outstanding combat aircraft, rather a technology carrier with field use capabilities.
The MiG-SK’s performance was good enough to earn OKB MiG an initial production run of 20 aircraft, primarily intended for training and development units, since the whole infrastructure and procedures for naval aviation from a carrier had to be developed from scratch. These machines were built at slow pace until 1968 and trials were carried out in the vicinity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The MiG-SK successfully remained hidden from the public, since the Soviet Navy did not want to give away its plans for a CTOL carrier. Spy flights of balloons and aircraft recognized the MiG-SK, but the type was mistaken as MiG-17 fighters. Consequently, no NATO codename was ever allocated.
Alas, the future of the Soviet, carrier-borne fixed wing aircraft was not bright: Laid down in in 1970, the Kiev-class aircraft carriers (also known as Project 1143 or as the Krechyet (Gyrfalcon) class) were the first class of fixed-wing aircraft carriers to be built in the Soviet Union, and they entered service, together with the Yak-38 (Forger) VTOL fighter, in 1973. This weapon system already offered a combat performance similar to the MiG-SK, and the VTOL concept rendered the need for catapult launch and deck landing capability obsolete.
OKB MiG still tried to lobby for a CTOL aircraft (in the meantime, the swing-wing MiG-23 was on the drawing board, as well as a projected, navalized multi-purpose derivative, the MiG-23K), but to no avail.
Furthermore, carrier Project 1153 was cancelled in October 1978 as being too expensive, and a program for a smaller ship called Project 11435, more V/STOL-aircraft-oriented, was developed instead; in its initial stage, a version of 65,000 tons and 52 aircraft was proposed, but eventually an even smaller ship was built in the form of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers in 1985, outfitted with a 12-degree ski-jump bow flight deck instead of using complex aircraft catapults. This CTOL carrier was finally equipped with navalized Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft – and the MiG-SK paved the early way to these shipboard fighters, especially the MiG-29K.
General characteristics:
Crew: One
Length: 13.28 m (43 ft 6 in)
Wingspan: 10.39 m (34 ft)
Height: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Wing area: 22.6 m² (242.5 ft²)
Empty weight: 5.172 kg (11,392 lb)
Max. take-off weight: 7,560 kg (16,632 lb)
Powerplant:
2× Sorokin R3M-28 turbojets afterburning turbojets, rated at 33.8 kN (7,605 lbf) each
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,145 km/h (618 knots, 711 mph) at 3,000 m (10,000 ft)
Range: 2,060 km (1,111 nmi, 1,280 mi) with drop tanks
Service ceiling: 17,500 m (57,400 ft)
Rate of climb: 180 m/s (35,425 ft/min)
Wing loading: 302.4 kg/m² (61.6 lb/ft²)
Thrust/weight: 0.86
Armament:
2x 30 mm NR-30 cannons in the wing roots with 75 RPG
4x underwing pylons, with a maximum load of 1.000 kg (2.205 lb)
The kit and its assembly:
This kitbash creation was spawned by thoughts concerning the Soviet Naval Aviation and its lack of CTOL aircraft carriers until the 1980ies and kicked-off by a CG rendition of a navalized MiG-17 from fellow member SPINNERS at whatifmodelers.com, posted a couple of months ago. I liked this idea, and at first I wanted to convert a MiG-17 with a solid nose as a dedicated carrier aircraft. But the more I thought about it and did historic research, the less probable this concept appeared to me: the MiG-17 was simply too old to match Soviet plans for a carrier ship, at least with the real world as reference.
A plausible alternative was the MiG-19, esp. with its twin-engine layout, even though the highly swept wings and the associated high start and landing speeds would be rather inappropriate for a shipborne fighter. Anyway, a MiG-21 was even less suitable, and I eventually took the Farmer as conversion basis, since it would also fit into the historic time frame between the late 60ies and the mid-70ies.
In this case, the basis is a Plastyk MiG-19 kit, one of the many Eastern European re-incarnations of the vintage KP kit. This cheap re-issue became a positive surprise, because any former raised panel and rivet details have disappeared and were replaced with sound, recessed engravings. The kit is still a bit clumsy, the walls are very thick (esp. the canopy – maybe 2mm!), but IMHO it’s a considerable improvement with acceptable fit, even though there are some sink holes and some nasty surprises (in my case, for instance, the stabilizer fins would not match with the rear fuselage at all, and you basically need putty everywhere).
Not much from the Plastyk kit was taken over, though: only the fuselage’s rear two-thirds were used, some landing gear parts as well as fin and the horizontal stabilizers. The latter were heavily modified and reduced in sweep in order to match new wings from a Hobby Boss MiG-15 (the parts were cut into three pieces each and then set back together again).
Furthermore, the complete front section from a Novo Supermarine Attacker was transplanted, because its short nose and the high cockpit are perfect parts for a carrier aircraft. The Attacker’s front end, including the air intakes, fits almost perfectly onto the round MiG-19 forward fuselage, only little body work was necessary. A complete cockpit tub and a new seat were implanted, as well as a front landing gear well and walls inside of the (otherwise empty) air intakes. The jet exhausts were drilled open, too, and afterburner dummies added. Simple jobs.
On the other side, the wings were trickier than expected. The MiG-19 kit comes with voluminous and massive wing root fairings, probably aerodynamic bodies for some area-ruling. I decided to keep them, but this caused some unexpected troubles…
The MiG-15 wings’ position, considerably further back due to the reduced sweep angle, was deduced from the relative MiG-19’s landing gear position. A lot of sculpting and body work followed, and after the wings were finally in place I recognized that the aforementioned, thick wing root fairings had reduced the wing sweep – basically not a bad thing, but with the inconvenient side effect that the original wing MiG-15 fences were not parallel to the fuselage anymore, looking rather awkward! What to do? Grrrr…. I could not leave it that way, so I scraped them away and replaced with them with four scratched substitutes (from styrene profiles), moving the outer pair towards the wing folding mechanism.
Under the wings, four new pylons were added (two from an IAI Kfir, two from a Su-22) and the ordnance gathered from the scrap box – bombs and rocket pods formerly belonged to a Kangnam/Revell Yak-38.
The landing gear was raised by ~2mm for a higher stance on the ground. The original, thick central fin was reduced in length, so that it could become a plausible attachment point for an arrester hook (also from the spares box), and a pair of splayed stabilizer fins was added as a compensation. Finally, some of the OOB air scoops were placed all round the hull and some pitots, antennae and a gun camera fairing added.
Painting and markings:
This whif was to look naval at first sight, so I referred to the early Yak-38 VTOL aircraft and their rather minimalistic paint scheme in an overall dull blue. The green underside, seen on many service aircraft, was AFAIK a (later) protective coating – an obsolete detail for a CTOL aircraft.
Hence, all upper surfaces and the fuselage were painted in a uniform “Field Blue” (Tamiya XF-50). It’s a bit dark, but I have used this unique, petrol blue tone many moons ago on a real world Kangnam Forger where it looks pretty good, and in this case the surface was furthermore shaded with Humbrol 96 and 126 after a black in wash.
For some contrast I painted the undersides of the wings and stabilizers as well as a fuselage section between the wings in a pale grey (Humbrol 167), seen on one of the Yak-38 prototypes. Not very obvious, but at least the aircraft did not end up in a boring, uniform color.
The interior was painted in blue-gray (PRU Blue, shaded with Humbrol 87) while the landing gear wells became Aluminum (Humbrol 56). The wheel discs became bright green, just in order to keep in style and as a colorful contrast, and some di-electric panels and covers became very light grey or bright green. For some color contrast, the anti-flutter weight tips on the stabilizers as well as the pylons’ front ends were painted bright red.
The markings/decals reflect the early Soviet Navy style, with simple Red Stars, large yellow tactical codes and some high contrast warning stencils, taken from the remains of a Yak-38 sheet (American Revell re-release of the Kangnam kit).
Finally, after some soot stains with graphite around the gun muzzles and the air bleed doors, the kit was sealed with a coat of semi-matt acrylic varnish and some matt accents (anti-glare panel, radomes).
A simple idea that turned out to be more complex than expected, due to the wing fence troubles. But I am happy that the Attacker nose could be so easily transplanted, it changes the MiG-19’s look considerably, as well as the wings with (much) less sweep angle.
The aircraft looks familiar, but you only recognize at second glance that it is more than just a MiG-19 with a solid nose. The thing looks pretty retro, reminds me a bit of the Supermarine Scimitar (dunno?), and IMHO it appears more Chinese than Soviet (maybe because the layout reminds a lot of the Q-5 fighter bomber)? It could even, with appropriate markings, be a Luft ’46 design?
NRCS ARTICLE 4/2020: There’s a sense of pride that comes with doing something for yourself, and growing food is a major part of being self-sustaining, healthy and whole.
A one-acre community garden on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota is connecting tribal members with the land, with food, and with their past.
“It’s about food sovereignty. It’s about having the choice of where and how you get your food, knowing how to feed yourself,” said Matte Wilson. “If that grocery store wasn’t here, would you know how to feed yourself and your family?”
Born and raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wilson is now director of the recently re-branded Sicangu Community Development Corporation (CDC) Food Sovereignty Initiative. One of its major projects is the Keya Wakpala Garden. Since moving back home in 2018, food sovereignty has played a major part of Wilson’s life.
“It is something that really excites me, something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life,” he said.
Vegetable Harvest on table
The food sovereignty movement has gained significant momentum throughout the country in recent years and is largely being led by indigenous communities. According to Wilson, you don’t have to be indigenous to appreciate delicious, locally grown foods.
“Food has the power to bring people together – it’s always been an essential part of all of our social interactions, whether or not you are Lakota,” he said.
For Keya Wakpala garden manager Ed Her Many Horses, the garden and learning how to grow food has been nothing short of trans-formative.
“It’s impacted me in a lot of different ways,” he said. “It helped give me a reason to get up in the morning – it still does. There is so much to appreciate in the garden.”
But it’s more than food, he’s found. Caring for a garden fosters community. The Keya Wakpala Garden is a place where interns, volunteers, community members and children come together to work, and they take pride in the outcome.
“It’s a beacon of hope, I think,” Her Many Horses said.
The Boys and Girls Club brings kids to the garden where they can plant, pick vegetables and even harvest indigenous foods such as ceyaka, wild mint, in the nearby wetlands. They learn to identify foods as they’re grown and harvested, and follow up field work with cooking sessions. Starting with young kids, the project aims to make gardening and producing food something that’s second nature – something they’re able to pass on to future generations.
Learning by doing is key, according to Wilson.
“When they are able to see it in person and participate in the process, it is really powerful. It makes people appreciate food and agriculture more,” he said.
Garden Row signs in lakota
Foster Cournoyer-Hogan is a student at Stanford University from the Rosebud Indian Reservation who interned for the summer at the Keya Wakpala Garden. His additions to the garden plot included the signs that identified the plants with Lakota words. There was wagmu (squash), tinpsilazizi (carrots), phangi sasa (beets) and mastincatawote (lettuce).
Using the Lakota language is a way to stay connected to traditional culture. That’s especially important when children and elders visit the garden, he said.
Along with strengthening connections to culture and community, the garden is helping solve another issue on the reservation – addressing health challenges. Diabetes and diet related illness is high on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, but the produce from the garden gives people access to nourishing food.
“Our food is everything,” Cournoyer-Hogan said.
“Food is medicine,” added Wilson: “The way we treat our garden, the way we treat the land is how we treat ourselves … we take care of the land, and it takes care of us.”
The group has some expert resources when it comes to taking care of the land and the plants. Master Gardeners and university extension experts have volunteered their time and advice, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides support and funding through soil health programs.
The mission of NRCS is “helping people help the land.” That land usually refers to range land and farm acres, but the same programs and principles can apply to community gardens.
“We're trying to get people together to go back to some of the things that were important years ago to our people for self-sustainability,” said Mary Scott, a Rosebud Indian Reservation member and tribal liaison with NRCS.
Student gardner holding out herbs for the camera
The reservation’s growing environment presents some significant challenges. The garden site had been a conventional field, growing sunflowers, corn, soybeans and wheat. The heavy clay soils made it difficult to hold enough water for the garden, especially given the sloping hillside where it sits. Long, hot days would burn up the plants one day, and they next they’d be hit by torrential downpours, hail and wind.
“There are a lot of things outside of our control,” said Her Many Horses, “and that can be tough in such an extreme weather environment”
Rather than give up, however, the team has simply learned to adapt and make the most of what they have.
“We have to be really strategic about how we plan out our year to make the most of this short window,” Wilson said. “We have branched into utilizing some year-round growing structures to expand our season.”
The garden is tended with organic methods, using fish emulsion and compost for fertilizer. Local ranchers have donated hay bales – the more beaten-up and weather-worn the better. As ground cover, they help with weed control. Adding mulch or organic matter has helped break up the hard, clay soil and has been a huge asset for moisture retention as well.
We’re using a regenerative approach to agriculture,” said Her Many Horses. “We’re always trying to give back to our soil.
The garden also incorporates time-honored growing techniques of the tribal community. Produce is grown with the three sister’s method – beans, corn and squash grow in rows and benefit from one another.
“Beans help fertilize the soil by providing nitrogen,” Wilson explained. “The corn, when it grows up the stalk, the beans are able to wrap around the stalk, and the squash actually helps keep out pests and other weeds.”
7 workers talking in the garden
It’s one of many ways the garden is bringing the community back to its roots. It also brings youth and elders together, sharing a positive outlook while producing something for the whole community. It connects people with land and community, giving them knowledge to pass along wherever they go.
Sharing knowledge is a big part of the project, Scott said, because it’s how cultures and traditions are kept alive.
“Growing our own produce is very important, so that this community can become self-sustaining, not only as a people, but as a tribe,” she said.
The ultimate goal is to completely change the food system on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
“My vision is that our community becomes a food center where we have restaurants and food trucks sourcing their foods locally,” Wilson said, “and the garden is the first step to helping change our community mindset about food.”
But it goes even deeper than that.
“I hope that our community can be healthy and happy, that we can be sovereign,” said Her Many Horses. “And for us, that starts with everyone knowing where their food comes from.”
HENRY HOLLAND was born on February 12, 1875 at Durham, England, in the home of his Grandfather Tristram, residentiary Canon of Durham. On the paternal side of his family there were also close ties with the Church of England, his father being a parish priest and his father before him Vicar of Walmer Beach and chaplain to the Duke of Wellington. An aunt, Katie Tristram, who went to Japan as an educational missionary, was the first family link with the mission field.
The dominant influence of his life was his energetic mother, whom he remembers as always on the lookout for a way to help others. It was genial and hospitable Canon Tristram's zest for life, interest
in people and moral courage that also set for the boy a pattern of character to follow. He took example, too, from his father's visits and kindness as a parish priest to every family in the community, whether Churchmen or not.
His travels began in infancy when he was taken to Riga, Latvia, where his father served as English chaplain until the boy was five. The father's next appointment to the parish of Cornhill in north Northumberland brought the family back to the seat of three generations of forebears on his mother's side. The Holland home was on the banks of the Tweed and, though considered delicate, the boy reveled in the fishing, riding, and hunting to hounds afforded by the country life. Later, this experience was to serve him well when he would make arduous journeys to remote parts of Baluchistan on camel or pony.
Tutored by his father and two maiden aunts until he was 11, he went to Durham School for one term and then on to his uncle's school, Loretto, near Edinburgh. Training there was in a Spartan tradition, with high educational standards, daily exercise and much time spent in the open air. His son RONALD also attended this school and three grandsons have followed.
At the end of his last term at Loretto, HENRY went by his parents' arrangement but against his will to a two weeks summer camp instituted to bring the claims of Christ before public school boys. The camp provided a full schedule of exercise and each evening ended with an appeal to the boys to give their lives to His service. He resisted until the last evening before making the decision that revolutionized his life.
Deciding to serve God as a doctor, he enrolled at Edinburgh in 1894 for medical training. Prompted by the example of men he came to know who had chosen a missionary vocation, he joined the Student Volunteer Missionary Union, pledging himself to become a missionary doctor. This step, taken toward the end of his undergraduate study, gave his life a new sense of drive and direction. Advised to interrupt the first year of his medical course after several prolonged attacks of influenza, he had spent a six weeks holiday on the Continent when a Liverpool merchant invited him as a traveling companion on a trip to the United States. Two months later, when his benefactor offered to make him his U.S. representative at what seemed to the college student a staggering sum, he declined the offer. Returning to the University, he entered wholeheartedly into missionary activities and by severe self-discipline was able to graduate in 1899, passing among the first eight, with distinction in both second and final examinations.
The next seven months he spent visiting various colleges and universities in Great Britain and Ireland as Traveling Secretary of the Student Volunteer Mission, a position his elder brother had held when he left Oxford. Professionally, he was later to feel acutely his lack of practical experience on a hospital staff, and, when his two sons decided to join him on the Frontier, they took hospital appointments in England before going abroad.
Dr. HOLLAND had offered his services to the Church Missionary Society shortly after graduation and, in March 1900, still with four months left of his contract as Traveling Secretary, he was called to Quetta, on the remote North-West Frontier of India, to take the place of the doctor shortly going on leave. He had three weeks to prepare for his journey to a place he had never heard of.
Traveling by cramped third class overland to Marseilles, he continued on by sea in an airless lower berth, such as was allotted to second class passengers at the turn of the century. A typhoid inoculation beyond Port Said made him severely ill, and he suffered a virulent attack of the fever seven months after reaching Quetta. From Karachi, he completed the last 400 miles by train, climbing from the dust-thickened air over the Sind desert and plains, through the desolate Baluchistan hills to the upland plateau where Quetta stands, ringed by towering peaks, 5,500 feet above sea level. As he left the plains he began to see large, fierce-looking tribesmen who seemed a piece with the harsh surroundings. His first sight of the city-oasis that was to be his home was memorable—arriving on the 6th of May, the weary traveler delighted in the greenness and profusion of blooming roses.
The medical mission at Quetta, established 14 years earlier, was one of a chain of four along the North-West Frontier originally encouraged by British army and political officers to help keep peace among the tribesmen as well as treat their physical ills. To the first outpatient building constructed in 1889, had been added four wards with 28 beds for inpatients, one operating room and a dark room for ophthalmoscopic work. It was a small but brave assertion of Christian care and compassion in the heart of a hostile land, for killing an infidel as a way to attain Paradise was common practice among fanatical Muslims in those early days.
The Frontier it served was a bleak and isolated land of rugged mountains and great stretches of arid, rocky plains. Apart from the railway to Quetta, there were few roads and only rough trails across the wastelands and through the passes. Excepting the British garrison and government officers at Quetta and the few other stations, the inhabitants were mostly scattered tribespeople who changed their dwellings with the season. Separated by deserts and mountain ranges, the various tribes seldom mixed together. Education in a formal sense was unknown, and there was little desire for schooling among those living in or near the Frontier stations to whom it was available.
Dr. HOLLAND found the hospital in full swing; spring and autumn were the busiest, when caravans could move without hindrance of snow and freezing temperatures or the intolerable summer heat. Among the patients were small-statured Brahui, of supposed Dravidian stock, who came in droves after their winter sojourn to the plains south of Sibi on their way back to the uplands. Tall, hardy Pathans, the Afghan tribes living on the then British side of the border, came down from the mountains to the north. A Pushtu-speaking Semitic people, they claimed descent from the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Baluchi arrived as the weather warmed, from the southern foothills and plains running east from Sibi to the Punjabi frontier. Also a Semitic people and often of fine physique, their language was a form of Persian. Journeying up from the plains were Sindhis and Punjabis.
The doctor was not put off by the Muslim fanaticism, blood feuding and raiding that characterized a part of the tribesmen's way of life. Seeing their strength in adversity and the obvious need for medical attention, he quickly took up the challenge of adjusting to life in entirely strange surroundings.
Work for the young medical graduate began at once. Dysentery and malaria were common ills. Surgical needs were great though limited facilities permitted treatment mostly of hemorrhoids, tubercular glands and cataracts. As he had not had hospital experience, he spent several hours each day working with the doctor he was soon to replace, learning surgical technique. Otherwise learning by doing, he was soon administering treatment for all manner of ailments. Later, he was able to widen his knowledge through visits to hospitals in Kashmir, the Punjab and Sind.
By adhering to a rigorous daily regimen of work and study, he passed examinations in Urdu, Persian and Pushtu and mastered the rudiments of Brahui, Baluchi, Punjabi and Sindhi. Whenever the hospital work slackened, the adventurous doctor made treks into the outlying countryside, sometimes hunting and always learning more about the lives of the tribespeople and their medical needs. Cataracts and eye infections were endemic to the area, induced by glaring heat, searing winds, dust, flies, vitamin deficiency in the diet and calcium-laden water. Perhaps because the plight of the blind touched him most, he developed a special talent for eye surgery. On his return to Quetta in 1907, after a serious illness had necessitated an extended leave, he was given charge of the medical mission.
In the autumn of 1909, a wealthy Hindu merchant and philanthropist invited Dr. HOLLAND to spend the winter weeks treating patients at Shikarpur, in North Sind, offering to cover all expenses. The doctor and his two colleagues refused payment for their services, but agreed to return if the merchant would provide a building for their operative work. The small hospital that was ready the following year has now grown into one of the largest eye clinics in the world, able to care for 600 patients at a time. Though some other surgical cases are treated, the main work is ophthalmic.
Since 1920, some 150 eye specialists have come from India, Pakistan, the Continent, the United Kingdom and the United States to observe and work at Shikarpur. They pay their own traveling expenses and board and room for the privilege of working there. In a mutually beneficial exchange, the visiting doctors have brought the latest developments in surgical technique and themselves had valuable operative experience, performing up to 200 cataract operations in a month's stay, whereas two or three a week would be the average in most clinics elsewhere. Other medical missionaries also have come each year to join in the work. This outside help has meant that four doctors could each operate six hours a day. With such teamwork, as many as 3,000 operations have been performed during one two-month season at Shikarpur, of which 1,400 were for cataracts.
A second clinic was later established at Khairpur, also in North Sind, and for a time a clinic was operated for a few weeks each year in Karachi under the auspices of the Poor Patients' Relief Society. As other doctors joined the mission, stations were set up in the surrounding countryside to which medical and nursing staff were regularly assigned.
The main base was still Quetta, and the hospital there grew steadily, chiefly due to the increase of eye work. Facilities were better adapted to local custom with the addition of wards where patients could be accompanied by relatives with cooking pots. Between 1904 and 1930, 14 such wards were built for patients who would rather pay a rupee a day than go into a public ward; all were the gifts of grateful patients. Similar accommodations for very poor families were provided free. Patients often came from long distances, and to have their relatives with them during convalescence with a family camel, donkey or goat in the courtyard was a natural arrangement they appreciated.
The tradition of service was strengthened at Quetta by the building of a Christian nursing profession and the institution, in 1926, of a full-fledged training program for male nurses. From 1931, the mission hospital also trained a succession of dispensers. An X-ray unit had been purchased, in 1925, with donations from local sirdars and chieftains. By 1934, the number of beds had been increased to 124 and that year inpatients numbered 3,447 and major operations totalled 3,760. With the exercise of much faith and patience in a Muslim environment, old suspicion and distrust had given way to confidence, notably regarding surgery.
All of this painstakingly built physical plant was destroyed, in May 1935, when a disastrous earthquake laid Quetta in ruins, killing some 25,000 people in the city and environs. After five days in a hospital recuperating from a back injury sustained when he was pinned under falling beams, Dr. HOLLAND was appointed Chief Medical Officer of Baluchistan, in charge of rescue work, making provision for casualties and prevention of epidemics. This task completed, the intrepid doctor then faced the problem of reconstruction. "Striking while the iron was hot," he made a trip to England to raise funds. Other support for the Rebuilding Fund came from not then partitioned India. Temporary structures were in operation in 1936 and two years later the first permanent buildings went up. The new hospital was completed on the same site on May 6, 1940, 40 years from the day of his first arrival at Quetta.
In 1936, the doctor had been made a Knight-Bachelor in recognition of the work of the mission hospital and his contribution to ophthalmology. He had previously received the decoration of the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal and bar and, in 1929, the Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (C.I.E.) in tribute of his service to the tribespeople of Baluchistan.
His medical work on the Frontier meanwhile was becoming a family affair. Effie Tunbridge, the second nursing sister to join the Quetta mission became Dr. HOLLAND's wife four years later in 1910. Their elder son, Harry, joined his father in 1935. The second son, RONALD, born in Quetta in 1914, followed suit in 1940, after completing his medical training at Edinburgh. Marriage interrupted the plans of their daughter, Esme, also to serve on the Frontier. RONALD's wife, Joan, has carried on as a nurse, keeping hospital accounts and becoming an expert anesthetist though, stricken with paralytic polio a year after their marriage in 1940, she has the full use of only one arm and is unable to walk. When malaria, contracted marching through the Burma jungle in wartime, continued to undermine his health, Harry returned to England and, in 1953, started the Oversea Service, a pioneer venture under the auspices of the British Council of Churches and the Conference of British Missionary Societies to spread a sense of Christian responsibility among laymen going to assignments abroad. RONALD has taken his father's place in charge of the medical mission work in Pakistan. Excelling also in general surgery, he is recognized as the most skillful ophthalmic surgeon of the family. He has learned the many languages of Baluchistan and otherwise has carried on unbroken his father's legacy of compassionate service. Though even more patients than in his father's time are treated during the crowded winter months at Shikarpur and Khairpur and during the spring and autumn at Quetta, Dr. RONALD HOLLAND continues to visit the outlying areas. Setting up mobile clinics along the way he, too, performs delicate eye operations and treats assorted other ailments for poor tribespeople to whom no other help is available.
In treating the thousands who come each year to their hospitals and clinics the HOLLANDS developed mass operative techniques that have relevance for surgeons elsewhere who may be called upon to meet large-scale disasters. Where it was no uncommon experience to see 200 to 300 outpatients a day, the choice was made to forego elaborate treatment for a few and take care of as many as possible. Both father and son have done up to 70 cataract operations a day. Records were not as detailed as they would like, but each patient was recorded as to diagnosis, treatment, operation, operator, complications and result. Methods were simplified to the extreme, but the essential preoperative technique has been maintained and postoperative care adapted to the resources available and the mores of the people, proving, for example, that a cataract case can move about within hours after surgery without harmful effect. Despite severe handicaps, these careful adjustments to field conditions have produced excellent results. Though the Shikarpur clinic operates only two months each year, it can record more than 150,000 eye operations, including 80,000 cataract extractions of which 97 per cent have proved successful.
Feeling that the scientific part of their work should be brought before the profession, both Sir HENRY and Dr. RONALD HOLLAND have contributed articles to leading medical journals in India, Britain and the United States and read papers at the Oxford Ophthalmic Congress.
Following partition in 1947, Quetta and Shikarpur fell within the borders of West Pakistan. The hospitals helped through the difficult period of adjustment and now are continuing their good work. Beside the goodwill among the people and the tribal chieftains, based on trust, has been a growing appreciation of the Christian qualities of concern and integrity for which the hospitals have stood through the years.
Sir HENRY's retirement, due according to the rules of his mission society in 1940, was postponed for the duration of World War II and again delayed until conditions were settled enough for him to hand over to his sons and his Pakistani Christian assistant. In those postwar years, he served on Government Commissions, on Church and Mission councils and committees, sharing in the planning of medical policy both for the Church and the Government of India.
Finally leaving active service in March 1948, he was promptly called back again to treat the King of Afghanistan. Two years later and until his own eyesight began to fail in 1956, grateful tribesmen, led by a Baluch chief, made up a purse to pay his traveling expenses for an annual visit to his hospitals. During the remainder of those years, he traversed England raising funds, recruiting missionaries and encouraging young people to think less of themselves and more of service to others. Now 85, he came to Pakistan again this year to celebrate his golden jubilee among his beloved tribespeople.
Simple and unassuming in manner, this father and son bely their splendid record as two of the world's foremost eye surgeons. Both have been offered professional opportunities with high standing and handsome stipends but have chosen to devote their skills as medical missionaries among an isolated people. Of those who come to work or be treated at their hospitals, no question is asked as to their faith, but the doctors' own lives are a continual Christian challenge to all who know them.
Each day's work is preceded by prayer. In operating for hours on end visitors, too, have sensed the therapeutic value of the spiritual atmosphere thus created. To the HOLLANDS, prayer and healing go together, for healing to them "speaks" the same message as Christ's teaching—the love of God in whose sight every individual is important.
Mission Hospital Quetta was one of the 1st hospitals to be established at Quetta in 1886IT WAS .RUN BY Church Mission Society (CMS). One of its very 1st incharge was dr Henry Holland , who later was to be always assocated with it, not only just because of spending most of his life serving there but due to being instrumental in its expansion and great success. During the 1935 Quetta earthquake he was the chief medical officer of Baluchistan.
Dr. HENRY HOLLAND had offered his services to the Church Missionary Society shortly after graduation and, in March 1900, still with four months left of his contract as Traveling Secretary, he was called to Quetta, on the remote North-West Frontier of India, to take the place of the doctor shortly going on leave. He had three weeks to prepare for his journey to a place he had never heard of.
Traveling by cramped third class overland to Marseilles, he continued on by sea in an airless lower berth, such as was allotted to second class passengers at the turn of the century. A typhoid inoculation beyond Port Said made him severely ill, and he suffered a virulent attack of the fever seven months after reaching Quetta. From Karachi, he completed the last 400 miles by train, climbing from the dust-thickened air over the Sind desert and plains, through the desolate Baluchistan hills to the upland plateau where Quetta stands, ringed by towering peaks, 5,500 feet above sea level. As he left the plains he began to see large, fierce-looking tribesmen who seemed a piece with the harsh surroundings. His first sight of the city-oasis that was to be his home was memorable—arriving on the 6th of May, the weary traveler delighted in the greenness and profusion of blooming roses.
The medical mission at Quetta, established 14 years earlier, was one of a chain of four along the North-West Frontier originally encouraged by British army and political officers to help keep peace among the tribesmen as well as treat their physical ills. To the first outpatient building constructed in 1889, had been added four wards with 28 beds for inpatients, one operating room and a dark room for ophthalmoscopic work. It was a small but brave assertion of Christian care and compassion in the heart of a hostile land, for killing an infidel as a way to attain Paradise was common practice among fanatical Muslims in those early days.
The Frontier it served was a bleak and isolated land of rugged mountains and great stretches of arid, rocky plains. Apart from the railway to Quetta, there were few roads and only rough trails across the wastelands and through the passes. Excepting the British garrison and government officers at Quetta and the few other stations, the inhabitants were mostly scattered tribespeople who changed their dwellings with the season. Separated by deserts and mountain ranges, the various tribes seldom mixed together. Education in a formal sense was unknown, and there was little desire for schooling among those living in or near the Frontier stations to whom it was available.
Dr. HOLLAND found the hospital in full swing; spring and autumn were the busiest, when caravans could move without hindrance of snow and freezing temperatures or the intolerable summer heat. Among the patients were small-statured Brahui, of supposed Dravidian stock, who came in droves after their winter sojourn to the plains south of Sibi on their way back to the uplands. Tall, hardy Pathans, the Afghan tribes living on the then British side of the border, came down from the mountains to the north. A Pushtu-speaking Semitic people, they claimed descent from the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Baluchi arrived as the weather warmed, from the southern foothills and plains running east from Sibi to the Punjabi frontier. Also a Semitic people and often of fine physique, their language was a form of Persian. Journeying up from the plains were Sindhis and Punjabis.
The doctor was not put off by the Muslim fanaticism, blood feuding and raiding that characterized a part of the tribesmen's way of life. Seeing their strength in adversity and the obvious need for medical attention, he quickly took up the challenge of adjusting to life in entirely strange surroundings.
Work for the young medical graduate began at once. Dysentery and malaria were common ills. Surgical needs were great though limited facilities permitted treatment mostly of hemorrhoids, tubercular glands and cataracts. As he had not had hospital experience, he spent several hours each day working with the doctor he was soon to replace, learning surgical technique. Otherwise learning by doing, he was soon administering treatment for all manner of ailments. Later, he was able to widen his knowledge through visits to hospitals in Kashmir, the Punjab and Sind.
By adhering to a rigorous daily regimen of work and study, he passed examinations in Urdu, Persian and Pushtu and mastered the rudiments of Brahui, Baluchi, Punjabi and Sindhi. Whenever the hospital work slackened, the adventurous doctor made treks into the outlying countryside, sometimes hunting and always learning more about the lives of the tribespeople and their medical needs. Cataracts and eye infections were endemic to the area, induced by glaring heat, searing winds, dust, flies, vitamin deficiency in the diet and calcium-laden water. Perhaps because the plight of the blind touched him most, he developed a special talent for eye surgery. On his return to Quetta in 1907, after a serious illness had necessitated an extended leave, he was given charge of the medical mission.
In the autumn of 1909, a wealthy Hindu merchant and philanthropist invited Dr. HOLLAND to spend the winter weeks treating patients at Shikarpur, in North Sind, offering to cover all expenses. The doctor and his two colleagues refused payment for their services, but agreed to return if the merchant would provide a building for their operative work. The small hospital that was ready the following year has now grown into one of the largest eye clinics in the world, able to care for 600 patients at a time. Though some other surgical cases are treated, the main work is ophthalmic.
Since 1920, some 150 eye specialists have come from India, Pakistan, the Continent, the United Kingdom and the United States to observe and work at Shikarpur. They pay their own traveling expenses and board and room for the privilege of working there. In a mutually beneficial exchange, the visiting doctors have brought the latest developments in surgical technique and themselves had valuable operative experience, performing up to 200 cataract operations in a month's stay, whereas two or three a week would be the average in most clinics elsewhere. Other medical missionaries also have come each year to join in the work. This outside help has meant that four doctors could each operate six hours a day. With such teamwork, as many as 3,000 operations have been performed during one two-month season at Shikarpur, of which 1,400 were for cataracts.
A second clinic was later established at Khairpur, also in North Sind, and for a time a clinic was operated for a few weeks each year in Karachi under the auspices of the Poor Patients' Relief Society. As other doctors joined the mission, stations were set up in the surrounding countryside to which medical and nursing staff were regularly assigned.
The main base was still Quetta, and the hospital there grew steadily, chiefly due to the increase of eye work. Facilities were better adapted to local custom with the addition of wards where patients could be accompanied by relatives with cooking pots. Between 1904 and 1930, 14 such wards were built for patients who would rather pay a rupee a day than go into a public ward; all were the gifts of grateful patients. Similar accommodations for very poor families were provided free. Patients often came from long distances, and to have their relatives with them during convalescence with a family camel, donkey or goat in the courtyard was a natural arrangement they appreciated.
The tradition of service was strengthened at Quetta by the building of a Christian nursing profession and the institution, in 1926, of a full-fledged training program for male nurses. From 1931, the mission hospital also trained a succession of dispensers. An X-ray unit had been purchased, in 1925, with donations from local sirdars and chieftains. By 1934, the number of beds had been increased to 124 and that year inpatients numbered 3,447 and major operations totalled 3,760. With the exercise of much faith and patience in a Muslim environment, old suspicion and distrust had given way to confidence, notably regarding surgery.
All of this painstakingly built physical plant was destroyed, in May 1935, when a disastrous earthquake laid Quetta in ruins, killing some 25,000 people in the city and environs. After five days in a hospital recuperating from a back injury sustained when he was pinned under falling beams, Dr. HOLLAND was appointed Chief Medical Officer of Baluchistan, in charge of rescue work, making provision for casualties and prevention of epidemics. This task completed, the intrepid doctor then faced the problem of reconstruction. "Striking while the iron was hot," he made a trip to England to raise funds. Other support for the Rebuilding Fund came from not then partitioned India. Temporary structures were in operation in 1936 and two years later the first permanent buildings went up. The new hospital was completed on the same site on May 6, 1940, 40 years from the day of his first arrival at Quetta.
In 1936, the doctor had been made a Knight-Bachelor in recognition of the work of the mission hospital and his contribution to ophthalmology. He had previously received the decoration of the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal and bar and, in 1929, the Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (C.I.E.) in tribute of his service to the tribespeople of Baluchistan.
His medical work on the Frontier meanwhile was becoming a family affair. Effie Tunbridge, the second nursing sister to join the Quetta mission became Dr. HOLLAND's wife four years later in 1910. Their elder son, Harry, joined his father in 1935. The second son, RONALD, born in Quetta in 1914, followed suit in 1940, after completing his medical training at Edinburgh. Marriage interrupted the plans of their daughter, Esme, also to serve on the Frontier. RONALD's wife, Joan, has carried on as a nurse, keeping hospital accounts and becoming an expert anesthetist though, stricken with paralytic polio a year after their marriage in 1940, she has the full use of only one arm and is unable to walk. When malaria, contracted marching through the Burma jungle in wartime, continued to undermine his health, Harry returned to England and, in 1953, started the Oversea Service, a pioneer venture under the auspices of the British Council of Churches and the Conference of British Missionary Societies to spread a sense of Christian responsibility among laymen going to assignments abroad. RONALD has taken his father's place in charge of the medical mission work in Pakistan. Excelling also in general surgery, he is recognized as the most skillful ophthalmic surgeon of the family. He has learned the many languages of Baluchistan and otherwise has carried on unbroken his father's legacy of compassionate service. Though even more patients than in his father's time are treated during the crowded winter months at Shikarpur and Khairpur and during the spring and autumn at Quetta, Dr. RONALD HOLLAND continues to visit the outlying areas. Setting up mobile clinics along the way he, too, performs delicate eye operations and treats assorted other ailments for poor tribespeople to whom no other help is available.
In treating the thousands who come each year to their hospitals and clinics the HOLLANDS developed mass operative techniques that have relevance for surgeons elsewhere who may be called upon to meet large-scale disasters. Where it was no uncommon experience to see 200 to 300 outpatients a day, the choice was made to forego elaborate treatment for a few and take care of as many as possible. Both father and son have done up to 70 cataract operations a day. Records were not as detailed as they would like, but each patient was recorded as to diagnosis, treatment, operation, operator, complications and result. Methods were simplified to the extreme, but the essential preoperative technique has been maintained and postoperative care adapted to the resources available and the mores of the people, proving, for example, that a cataract case can move about within hours after surgery without harmful effect. Despite severe handicaps, these careful adjustments to field conditions have produced excellent results. Though the Shikarpur clinic operates only two months each year, it can record more than 150,000 eye operations, including 80,000 cataract extractions of which 97 per cent have proved successful.
Feeling that the scientific part of their work should be brought before the profession, both Sir HENRY and Dr. RONALD HOLLAND have contributed articles to leading medical journals in India, Britain and the United States and read papers at the Oxford Ophthalmic Congress.
Following partition in 1947, Quetta and Shikarpur fell within the borders of West Pakistan. The hospitals helped through the difficult period of adjustment and now are continuing their good work. Beside the goodwill among the people and the tribal chieftains, based on trust, has been a growing appreciation of the Christian qualities of concern and integrity for which the hospitals have stood through the years.
Sir HENRY's retirement, due according to the rules of his mission society in 1940, was postponed for the duration of World War II and again delayed until conditions were settled enough for him to hand over to his sons and his Pakistani Christian assistant. In those postwar years, he served on Government Commissions, on Church and Mission councils and committees, sharing in the planning of medical policy both for the Church and the Government of India.
Finally leaving active service in March 1948, he was promptly called back again to treat the King of Afghanistan. Two years later and until his own eyesight began to fail in 1956, grateful tribesmen, led by a Baluch chief, made up a purse to pay his traveling expenses for an annual visit to his hospitals. During the remainder of those years, he traversed England raising funds, recruiting missionaries and encouraging young people to think less of themselves and more of service to others. Now 85, he came to Pakistan again this year to celebrate his golden jubilee among his beloved tribespeople.
Simple and unassuming in manner, this father and son bely their splendid record as two of the world's foremost eye surgeons. Both have been offered professional opportunities with high standing and handsome stipends but have chosen to devote their skills as medical missionaries among an isolated people. Of those who come to work or be treated at their hospitals, no question is asked as to their faith, but the doctors' own lives are a continual Christian challenge to all who know them.
Each day's work is preceded by prayer. In operating for hours on end visitors, too, have sensed the therapeutic value of the spiritual atmosphere thus created. To the HOLLANDS, prayer and healing go together, for healing to them "speaks" the same message as Christ's teaching—the love of God in whose sight every individual is important.
August 1960
Manila
REFERENCES:
Holland, Sir Henry, Frontier Doctor. London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1958. (Much of the above statement has been taken from this source with the author's permission.)
Hall, Clarence W. "He's Given Sight to 100,000." Reprinted from Reader's Digest, March, 1957.
Letters and articles by doctors in the United States who have visited Shikarpur.
Articles appearing in the Karachi press.
Interviews with persons in Karachi and at Shikarpur acquainted with the Hollands and their medical mission work.
www.1001pallets.com/2015/06/pallet-crafter-interview-4-he...
We continue our series of interview, this time with Heather Poole who is an active contributor at 1001Pallets and she's making a lot of useful things out of repurposed wooden pallets. If you think you deserve to be featured in the next interview, please, drop us an email.
Tell us a little more about you? Who you are? Where are you from?
Hello! My name is Heather Stiletto and I’m currently living in Southern California, USA. I was away in other states for almost 20 years, but moved back here in 2004. I'm a LVN (Licensed Vocational Nurse) and also a nurse educator. I've got 2 Mastiffs (an English and Neapolitan), and 3 cats. No children, but I do have some fun vehicles! :D
Why do you craft?
I have always enjoyed crafts in general to get my mind off of work, stress, life – the normal reasons – but I started experimenting with woodworking for two reasons: 1) to continue an exercise program by being outside, working in the yard, keeping myself away from food and 2) because of necessity. I’d love to say I’m rolling in dough, but I worked part-time, and I had more wants than funds, so when a plastic chaise lounge broke a couple of years ago, I was frustrated with having to replace it each summer due to sun rot… and wanted a better quality one. I looked around and nice wooden chaise lounges (well, I use the term “nice” loosely; as many of them were of poor quality for the exorbitant prices they were carrying). I started to look closer at the forms and designs, and thought, “I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve got some leftover lumber from other projects.” My husband had been bringing pallets home to collect enough for some shed repairs, but I snuck some boards…. Downloaded some pictures and ideas, and a few different plans and combined the elements I liked the best into my own chaise lounger. That got me hooked!
How did you learn?
My father is to blame or credit… depending on how frustrated I am with my pile of wood in the yard, haha! Seriously, he didn’t like the idea of dependent females getting ripped off at the mechanic’s. He wouldn’t let me get a driver’s license until I took at least one year of auto shop; and I loved it so much I took two, plus was always his little “grease monkey” growing up. Tools came naturally. I didn’t do many of the cutting tools as a child and teen, but I started learning them when I moved out on my own and did small repairs here and there, and then when I bought my first house and had to replace the bannisters, I had to learn! I learned with the help of the ‘net, and from my husband’s experience, as he’s gutted and restored two houses, but he’s not a pro like the guys on t.v. – he’s had to do a lot of try-and-fail experiments. I learned skills over time; watched a lot of “This Old House”, and similar shows, and got past the fear by trying small things, like fencing repair, and deck repair when my Mastiffs decided they made good snacks. :-D Nowadays, I turn to Pinterest, and then just good ol’ Google!
Since when are you working with pallets?
Pallets were my husband’s idea. He knew I’m quick to learn and abandon some projects, although others I’ve stuck with for years, and he wanted to see which way I’d go. He didn’t mind me using his tools, but he didn’t want to waste a lot of money on lumber. Fair enough, he’s helpful and goes on pallet hunting missions, haha! Now, although I’ve proved my long-term interest in wood projects, it’s the principle of the thing now. I don’t want to spend the money when I can turn something ugly and otherwise useless into something interesting and maybe even beautiful!
What are your can’t-live-without essentials?
My Makita 18V XLT impact driver and drill (in white – oh-so-girly!). I love these in particular because they’re lighter, and hold up to a full day of work in the yard building a planter or whatever. I’ve never had to switch out batteries. Now would these be appropriate for a construction worker? No, probably not, but they’re awesome for me. Lighter for women, and powerful enough to hold up to a full eight hours of drilling and screwing boards onto whatever you’re building. After that, would be a chop saw, table saw, a tape measure and a pencil!
How would you describe your style? Are there any crafters/artists/designers that you particularly look up to?
I am a freelancer. I really don’t have one particular style. I live in a California Craftsman/California bungalow 1920’s home, so when I’m building things specifically for the home, I lean towards a craftsman style. For things that I’m using (such as my chaise lounger), then it’s whatever floats my boat!
How is your workspace, how do you make it inspiring?
I don’t have a workspace. I have my back yard. I work on two old reclaimed doors that are on saw horses, and I face my beautiful orchid tree and the lawn that is slowly growing over the bare dirt. I’m currently building a shed so my tools will have their own home, and not sharing it with storage and yard tools.
What sorts of things are inspiring you right now? Where do you look for inspiration?
Preparedness projects; off-the-grid projects are really catching my eye right now. I look for inspiration all over, but mostly on Pinterest and just by a Google search. Think, “DIY_________” and fill in the specific blank that you want to know.
When do you feel the most creative?
When I’m by myself, with the headphones in, and the sun shining down as my dogs snore under my work bench.
We live in such a mass-produced, buy-it-now society. Why should people continue to make things by hand?
For many reasons: 1) to recycle. 2) For independence. 3) the ability to have something truly unique. 4) Knowing what goes into your house/project. I’m not buying crappy pressboard. I’m using pine, oak, maple, etc., as I snag unusual pallets. 4) bragging rights! Even though I suck, and haven’t a clue what I’m doing yet, and go back and second-guess every design I’ve done, I still enjoy it. It’s a challenge, and I like learning by doing. I’ve undone assembly (which is why I tend to screw most of my work together and will undo and glue when I’m confident I’m liking the design).
What is your favorite medium to work in?
Pine is fun; easy to manipulate, not to heavy, and smells heavenly when you sand it. However, I’ve recently gotten some red oak and even some maple, and that’s been fun too. I’ve also reclaimed a stash of 1920’s California redwood, and that’s just STUNNING…. So much fun to see something that’s old, weathered, and ugly become gorgeous. But woodworking is just one outlet. I like assembly in general, which is why I like sewing, tatting, and jewelry making, as well as pergamano and some painting (such as decorating shoes, etc.). One of my other great passions is writing.
What are your tips for people who'd like to start crafting?
DON’T WAIT! You don’t have to be formally trained. You don’t have to be the “Norm Abrams” to pick up a power tool. One caveat – if you’ve never used a power tool before, look it up. See about safety considerations. I’ve been having fun with chop saws, table saws, routers, roto zips, Sawzalls, and other sharp and deadly tools, but have only had one injury in a year (except for lots of splinters) – and that was from a belt sander where my finger slipped and I got sanded!
I would also tell others that gender, orientation, or previous experience (or lack thereof). The best way to learn is by doing! Plus, I know I’m not uber-talented, but others out there ARE, and they are gracious enough to share their designs, plans, knowledge, and YouTube videos :D
What is your guilty pleasure?
Sunbathing on my chaise lounger. Otherwise, it’s my 2008 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14!
What is your favorite thing to do (other than crafting)?
Riding my motorcycle, writing, other various crafts (as listed above), walking my Mastiffs, goofing off on the ‘net finding new design inspirations, and cooking.
What do you recommend that most people do in terms of cleaning pallets and prepping them to become something else?
You don’t need a lot of fancy tools. You can absolutely disassemble them by hand, but I’ve found that a Sawzall ROCKS. Get a good set of blades (wood/metal), and just cut through the nails. I can then easily use a punch and hammer the nail heads out with no difficulty at all. WEAR GLOVES! Lots of spiders sometimes. Learn to pay attention to the different types of wood you get. Depending on which country they originated from, you can get some awesome woods! I use a hand sander (a Riobi palm sander), and have a cheapie Harbor Freight disc and belt sander combo that’s terrific. You can then see the pallets and know what to do with them!
To finish, anything else you would like to tell to pallet community?
Just that I’m so grateful for others who have very generously shared their knowledge base and design ideas, as well as amazing photographs to help us who are trying to learn more easily understand the how-to techniques. I’m thankful that others have taken the time and given me such wonderful feedback, although I do feel bad since many have asked for design steps, and I just don’t build to a plan a lot. I just see a picture and figure it out based on what wood I have. If it doesn’t work for the measurements, I change from the design and tweak it to match my ideas. I’m trying to think step-by-step directions for others, but I don’t generally because I’m not confident my stuff is up to par yet. There are some EXTREMELY talented people on www.1001pallets.com/, and I’m proud to be among them.
HENRY HOLLAND was born on February 12, 1875 at Durham, England, in the home of his Grandfather Tristram, residentiary Canon of Durham. On the paternal side of his family there were also close ties with the Church of England, his father being a parish priest and his father before him Vicar of Walmer Beach and chaplain to the Duke of Wellington. An aunt, Katie Tristram, who went to Japan as an educational missionary, was the first family link with the mission field.
The dominant influence of his life was his energetic mother, whom he remembers as always on the lookout for a way to help others. It was genial and hospitable Canon Tristram's zest for life, interest
in people and moral courage that also set for the boy a pattern of character to follow. He took example, too, from his father's visits and kindness as a parish priest to every family in the community, whether Churchmen or not.
His travels began in infancy when he was taken to Riga, Latvia, where his father served as English chaplain until the boy was five. The father's next appointment to the parish of Cornhill in north Northumberland brought the family back to the seat of three generations of forebears on his mother's side. The Holland home was on the banks of the Tweed and, though considered delicate, the boy reveled in the fishing, riding, and hunting to hounds afforded by the country life. Later, this experience was to serve him well when he would make arduous journeys to remote parts of Baluchistan on camel or pony.
Tutored by his father and two maiden aunts until he was 11, he went to Durham School for one term and then on to his uncle's school, Loretto, near Edinburgh. Training there was in a Spartan tradition, with high educational standards, daily exercise and much time spent in the open air. His son RONALD also attended this school and three grandsons have followed.
At the end of his last term at Loretto, HENRY went by his parents' arrangement but against his will to a two weeks summer camp instituted to bring the claims of Christ before public school boys. The camp provided a full schedule of exercise and each evening ended with an appeal to the boys to give their lives to His service. He resisted until the last evening before making the decision that revolutionized his life.
Deciding to serve God as a doctor, he enrolled at Edinburgh in 1894 for medical training. Prompted by the example of men he came to know who had chosen a missionary vocation, he joined the Student Volunteer Missionary Union, pledging himself to become a missionary doctor. This step, taken toward the end of his undergraduate study, gave his life a new sense of drive and direction. Advised to interrupt the first year of his medical course after several prolonged attacks of influenza, he had spent a six weeks holiday on the Continent when a Liverpool merchant invited him as a traveling companion on a trip to the United States. Two months later, when his benefactor offered to make him his U.S. representative at what seemed to the college student a staggering sum, he declined the offer. Returning to the University, he entered wholeheartedly into missionary activities and by severe self-discipline was able to graduate in 1899, passing among the first eight, with distinction in both second and final examinations.
The next seven months he spent visiting various colleges and universities in Great Britain and Ireland as Traveling Secretary of the Student Volunteer Mission, a position his elder brother had held when he left Oxford. Professionally, he was later to feel acutely his lack of practical experience on a hospital staff, and, when his two sons decided to join him on the Frontier, they took hospital appointments in England before going abroad.
Dr. HOLLAND had offered his services to the Church Missionary Society shortly after graduation and, in March 1900, still with four months left of his contract as Traveling Secretary, he was called to Quetta, on the remote North-West Frontier of India, to take the place of the doctor shortly going on leave. He had three weeks to prepare for his journey to a place he had never heard of.
Traveling by cramped third class overland to Marseilles, he continued on by sea in an airless lower berth, such as was allotted to second class passengers at the turn of the century. A typhoid inoculation beyond Port Said made him severely ill, and he suffered a virulent attack of the fever seven months after reaching Quetta. From Karachi, he completed the last 400 miles by train, climbing from the dust-thickened air over the Sind desert and plains, through the desolate Baluchistan hills to the upland plateau where Quetta stands, ringed by towering peaks, 5,500 feet above sea level. As he left the plains he began to see large, fierce-looking tribesmen who seemed a piece with the harsh surroundings. His first sight of the city-oasis that was to be his home was memorable—arriving on the 6th of May, the weary traveler delighted in the greenness and profusion of blooming roses.
The medical mission at Quetta, established 14 years earlier, was one of a chain of four along the North-West Frontier originally encouraged by British army and political officers to help keep peace among the tribesmen as well as treat their physical ills. To the first outpatient building constructed in 1889, had been added four wards with 28 beds for inpatients, one operating room and a dark room for ophthalmoscopic work. It was a small but brave assertion of Christian care and compassion in the heart of a hostile land, for killing an infidel as a way to attain Paradise was common practice among fanatical Muslims in those early days.
The Frontier it served was a bleak and isolated land of rugged mountains and great stretches of arid, rocky plains. Apart from the railway to Quetta, there were few roads and only rough trails across the wastelands and through the passes. Excepting the British garrison and government officers at Quetta and the few other stations, the inhabitants were mostly scattered tribespeople who changed their dwellings with the season. Separated by deserts and mountain ranges, the various tribes seldom mixed together. Education in a formal sense was unknown, and there was little desire for schooling among those living in or near the Frontier stations to whom it was available.
Dr. HOLLAND found the hospital in full swing; spring and autumn were the busiest, when caravans could move without hindrance of snow and freezing temperatures or the intolerable summer heat. Among the patients were small-statured Brahui, of supposed Dravidian stock, who came in droves after their winter sojourn to the plains south of Sibi on their way back to the uplands. Tall, hardy Pathans, the Afghan tribes living on the then British side of the border, came down from the mountains to the north. A Pushtu-speaking Semitic people, they claimed descent from the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Baluchi arrived as the weather warmed, from the southern foothills and plains running east from Sibi to the Punjabi frontier. Also a Semitic people and often of fine physique, their language was a form of Persian. Journeying up from the plains were Sindhis and Punjabis.
The doctor was not put off by the Muslim fanaticism, blood feuding and raiding that characterized a part of the tribesmen's way of life. Seeing their strength in adversity and the obvious need for medical attention, he quickly took up the challenge of adjusting to life in entirely strange surroundings.
Work for the young medical graduate began at once. Dysentery and malaria were common ills. Surgical needs were great though limited facilities permitted treatment mostly of hemorrhoids, tubercular glands and cataracts. As he had not had hospital experience, he spent several hours each day working with the doctor he was soon to replace, learning surgical technique. Otherwise learning by doing, he was soon administering treatment for all manner of ailments. Later, he was able to widen his knowledge through visits to hospitals in Kashmir, the Punjab and Sind.
By adhering to a rigorous daily regimen of work and study, he passed examinations in Urdu, Persian and Pushtu and mastered the rudiments of Brahui, Baluchi, Punjabi and Sindhi. Whenever the hospital work slackened, the adventurous doctor made treks into the outlying countryside, sometimes hunting and always learning more about the lives of the tribespeople and their medical needs. Cataracts and eye infections were endemic to the area, induced by glaring heat, searing winds, dust, flies, vitamin deficiency in the diet and calcium-laden water. Perhaps because the plight of the blind touched him most, he developed a special talent for eye surgery. On his return to Quetta in 1907, after a serious illness had necessitated an extended leave, he was given charge of the medical mission.
In the autumn of 1909, a wealthy Hindu merchant and philanthropist invited Dr. HOLLAND to spend the winter weeks treating patients at Shikarpur, in North Sind, offering to cover all expenses. The doctor and his two colleagues refused payment for their services, but agreed to return if the merchant would provide a building for their operative work. The small hospital that was ready the following year has now grown into one of the largest eye clinics in the world, able to care for 600 patients at a time. Though some other surgical cases are treated, the main work is ophthalmic.
Since 1920, some 150 eye specialists have come from India, Pakistan, the Continent, the United Kingdom and the United States to observe and work at Shikarpur. They pay their own traveling expenses and board and room for the privilege of working there. In a mutually beneficial exchange, the visiting doctors have brought the latest developments in surgical technique and themselves had valuable operative experience, performing up to 200 cataract operations in a month's stay, whereas two or three a week would be the average in most clinics elsewhere. Other medical missionaries also have come each year to join in the work. This outside help has meant that four doctors could each operate six hours a day. With such teamwork, as many as 3,000 operations have been performed during one two-month season at Shikarpur, of which 1,400 were for cataracts.
A second clinic was later established at Khairpur, also in North Sind, and for a time a clinic was operated for a few weeks each year in Karachi under the auspices of the Poor Patients' Relief Society. As other doctors joined the mission, stations were set up in the surrounding countryside to which medical and nursing staff were regularly assigned.
The main base was still Quetta, and the hospital there grew steadily, chiefly due to the increase of eye work. Facilities were better adapted to local custom with the addition of wards where patients could be accompanied by relatives with cooking pots. Between 1904 and 1930, 14 such wards were built for patients who would rather pay a rupee a day than go into a public ward; all were the gifts of grateful patients. Similar accommodations for very poor families were provided free. Patients often came from long distances, and to have their relatives with them during convalescence with a family camel, donkey or goat in the courtyard was a natural arrangement they appreciated.
The tradition of service was strengthened at Quetta by the building of a Christian nursing profession and the institution, in 1926, of a full-fledged training program for male nurses. From 1931, the mission hospital also trained a succession of dispensers. An X-ray unit had been purchased, in 1925, with donations from local sirdars and chieftains. By 1934, the number of beds had been increased to 124 and that year inpatients numbered 3,447 and major operations totalled 3,760. With the exercise of much faith and patience in a Muslim environment, old suspicion and distrust had given way to confidence, notably regarding surgery.
All of this painstakingly built physical plant was destroyed, in May 1935, when a disastrous earthquake laid Quetta in ruins, killing some 25,000 people in the city and environs. After five days in a hospital recuperating from a back injury sustained when he was pinned under falling beams, Dr. HOLLAND was appointed Chief Medical Officer of Baluchistan, in charge of rescue work, making provision for casualties and prevention of epidemics. This task completed, the intrepid doctor then faced the problem of reconstruction. "Striking while the iron was hot," he made a trip to England to raise funds. Other support for the Rebuilding Fund came from not then partitioned India. Temporary structures were in operation in 1936 and two years later the first permanent buildings went up. The new hospital was completed on the same site on May 6, 1940, 40 years from the day of his first arrival at Quetta.
In 1936, the doctor had been made a Knight-Bachelor in recognition of the work of the mission hospital and his contribution to ophthalmology. He had previously received the decoration of the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal and bar and, in 1929, the Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (C.I.E.) in tribute of his service to the tribespeople of Baluchistan.
His medical work on the Frontier meanwhile was becoming a family affair. Effie Tunbridge, the second nursing sister to join the Quetta mission became Dr. HOLLAND's wife four years later in 1910. Their elder son, Harry, joined his father in 1935. The second son, RONALD, born in Quetta in 1914, followed suit in 1940, after completing his medical training at Edinburgh. Marriage interrupted the plans of their daughter, Esme, also to serve on the Frontier. RONALD's wife, Joan, has carried on as a nurse, keeping hospital accounts and becoming an expert anesthetist though, stricken with paralytic polio a year after their marriage in 1940, she has the full use of only one arm and is unable to walk. When malaria, contracted marching through the Burma jungle in wartime, continued to undermine his health, Harry returned to England and, in 1953, started the Oversea Service, a pioneer venture under the auspices of the British Council of Churches and the Conference of British Missionary Societies to spread a sense of Christian responsibility among laymen going to assignments abroad. RONALD has taken his father's place in charge of the medical mission work in Pakistan. Excelling also in general surgery, he is recognized as the most skillful ophthalmic surgeon of the family. He has learned the many languages of Baluchistan and otherwise has carried on unbroken his father's legacy of compassionate service. Though even more patients than in his father's time are treated during the crowded winter months at Shikarpur and Khairpur and during the spring and autumn at Quetta, Dr. RONALD HOLLAND continues to visit the outlying areas. Setting up mobile clinics along the way he, too, performs delicate eye operations and treats assorted other ailments for poor tribespeople to whom no other help is available.
In treating the thousands who come each year to their hospitals and clinics the HOLLANDS developed mass operative techniques that have relevance for surgeons elsewhere who may be called upon to meet large-scale disasters. Where it was no uncommon experience to see 200 to 300 outpatients a day, the choice was made to forego elaborate treatment for a few and take care of as many as possible. Both father and son have done up to 70 cataract operations a day. Records were not as detailed as they would like, but each patient was recorded as to diagnosis, treatment, operation, operator, complications and result. Methods were simplified to the extreme, but the essential preoperative technique has been maintained and postoperative care adapted to the resources available and the mores of the people, proving, for example, that a cataract case can move about within hours after surgery without harmful effect. Despite severe handicaps, these careful adjustments to field conditions have produced excellent results. Though the Shikarpur clinic operates only two months each year, it can record more than 150,000 eye operations, including 80,000 cataract extractions of which 97 per cent have proved successful.
Feeling that the scientific part of their work should be brought before the profession, both Sir HENRY and Dr. RONALD HOLLAND have contributed articles to leading medical journals in India, Britain and the United States and read papers at the Oxford Ophthalmic Congress.
Following partition in 1947, Quetta and Shikarpur fell within the borders of West Pakistan. The hospitals helped through the difficult period of adjustment and now are continuing their good work. Beside the goodwill among the people and the tribal chieftains, based on trust, has been a growing appreciation of the Christian qualities of concern and integrity for which the hospitals have stood through the years.
Sir HENRY's retirement, due according to the rules of his mission society in 1940, was postponed for the duration of World War II and again delayed until conditions were settled enough for him to hand over to his sons and his Pakistani Christian assistant. In those postwar years, he served on Government Commissions, on Church and Mission councils and committees, sharing in the planning of medical policy both for the Church and the Government of India.
Finally leaving active service in March 1948, he was promptly called back again to treat the King of Afghanistan. Two years later and until his own eyesight began to fail in 1956, grateful tribesmen, led by a Baluch chief, made up a purse to pay his traveling expenses for an annual visit to his hospitals. During the remainder of those years, he traversed England raising funds, recruiting missionaries and encouraging young people to think less of themselves and more of service to others. Now 85, he came to Pakistan again this year to celebrate his golden jubilee among his beloved tribespeople.
Simple and unassuming in manner, this father and son bely their splendid record as two of the world's foremost eye surgeons. Both have been offered professional opportunities with high standing and handsome stipends but have chosen to devote their skills as medical missionaries among an isolated people. Of those who come to work or be treated at their hospitals, no question is asked as to their faith, but the doctors' own lives are a continual Christian challenge to all who know them.
Each day's work is preceded by prayer. In operating for hours on end visitors, too, have sensed the therapeutic value of the spiritual atmosphere thus created. To the HOLLANDS, prayer and healing go together, for healing to them "speaks" the same message as Christ's teaching—the love of God in whose sight every individual is important.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
After the success of the Soviet Union’s first carrier ship, the Moskva Class (Projekt 1123, also called „Кондор“/„Kondor“) cruisers in the mid 1960s, the country became more ambitious. This resulted in Project 1153 Orel (Russian: Орёл, Eagle), a planned 1970s-era Soviet program to give the Soviet Navy a true blue water aviation capability. Project Orel would have resulted in a program very similar to the aircraft carriers available to the U.S. Navy. The ship would have been about 75-80,000 tons displacement, with a nuclear power plant and carried about 70 aircraft launched via steam catapults – the first Soviet aircraft carrier that would be able to deploy fixed-wing aircraft.
Beyond this core capability, the Orel carrier was designed with a large offensive capability with the ship mounts including 24 vertical launch tubes for anti-ship cruise missiles. In the USSR it was actually classified as the "large cruiser with aircraft armament".
Anyway, the carrier needed appropriate aircraft, and in order to develop a the aircraft major design bureaus were asked to submit ideas and proposals in 1959. OKB Yakovlev and MiG responded. While Yakovlev concentrated on the Yak-36 VTOL design that could also be deployed aboard of smaller ships without catapult and arrester equipment, Mikoyan-Gurevich looked at navalized variants of existing or projected aircraft.
While land-based fighters went through a remarkable performance improvement during the 60ies, OKB MiG considered a robust aircraft with proven systems and – foremost – two engines to be the best start for the Soviet Union’s first naval fighter. “Learning by doing”, the gathered experience would then be used in a dedicated new design that would be ready in the mid 70ies when Project 1153 was ready for service, too.
Internally designated “I-SK” or “SK-01” (Samolyot Korabelniy = carrier-borne aircraft), the naval fighter was based on the MiG-19 (NATO: Farmer), which had been in production in the USSR since 1954.
Faster and more modern types like the MiG-21 were rejected for a naval conversion because of their poor take-off performance, uncertain aerodynamics in the naval environment and lack of ruggedness. The MiG-19 also offered the benefit of relatively compact dimensions, as well as a structure that would carry the desired two engines.
Several innovations had to be addresses:
- A new wing for improved low speed handling
- Improvement of the landing gear and internal structures for carrier operations
- Development of a wing folding mechanism
- Integration of arrester hook and catapult launch devices into the structure
- Protection of structure, engine and equipment from the aggressive naval environment
- Improvement of the pilot’s field of view for carrier landings
- Improved avionics, esp. for navigation
Work on the SK-01 started in 1960, and by 1962 a heavily redesigned MiG-19 was ready as a mock-up for inspection and further approval. The “new” aircraft shared the outlines with the land-based MiG-19, but the nose section was completely new and shared a certain similarity to the experimental “Aircraft SN”, a MiG-17 derivative with side air intakes and a solid nose that carried a. Unlike the latter, the cockpit had been moved forward, which offered, together with an enlarged canopy and a short nose, an excellent field of view for the pilot.
On the SK-01 the air intakes with short splitter plates were re-located to the fuselage flanks underneath the cockpit. In order to avoid gun smoke ingestion problems (and the lack of space in the nose for any equipment except for a small SRD-3 Grad gun ranging radar, coupled with an ASP-5N computing gun-sight), the SK-01’s internal armament, a pair of NR-30 cannon, was placed in the wing roots.
The wing itself was another major modification, it featured a reduced sweep of only 33° at ¼ chord angle (compared to the MiG-19’s original 55°). Four wing hardpoints, outside of the landing gear wells, could carry a modest ordnance payload, including rocket and gun pods, unguided missiles, iron bombs and up to four Vympel K-13 AAMs.
Outside of these pylons, the wings featured a folding mechanism that allowed the wing span to be reduced from 10 m to 6.5 m for stowage. The fin remained unchanged, but the stabilizers had a reduced sweep, too.
The single ventral fin of the MiG-19 gave way to a fairing for a massive, semi-retractable arrester hook, flanked by a pair of smaller fins. The landing gear was beefed up, too, with a stronger suspension. Catapult launch from deck was to be realized through expandable cables that were attached onto massive hooks under the fuselage.
The SK-01 received a “thumbs up” in March 1962 and three prototypes, powered by special Sorokin R3M-28 engines, derivatives of the MiG-19's RB-9 that were adapted to the naval environment, were created and tested until 1965, when the type – now designated MiG-SK – went through State Acceptance Trials, including simulated landing tests on an “unsinkalble carrier” dummy, a modified part of the runway at Air Base at the Western coast of the Caspian Sea. Not only flight tests were conducted at Kaspiysk, but also different layouts for landing cables were tested and optimized as well. Furthermore, on a special platform at the coast, an experimental steam catapult went through trials, even though no aircraft starts were made from it – but weights hauled out into the sea.
Anyway, the flight tests and the landing performance on the simulated carrier deck were successful, and while the MiG-SK (the machine differed from the MiG-19 so much that it was not recognized as an official MiG-19 variant) was not an outstanding combat aircraft, rather a technology carrier with field use capabilities.
The MiG-SK’s performance was good enough to earn OKB MiG an initial production run of 20 aircraft, primarily intended for training and development units, since the whole infrastructure and procedures for naval aviation from a carrier had to be developed from scratch. These machines were built at slow pace until 1968 and trials were carried out in the vicinity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The MiG-SK successfully remained hidden from the public, since the Soviet Navy did not want to give away its plans for a CTOL carrier. Spy flights of balloons and aircraft recognized the MiG-SK, but the type was mistaken as MiG-17 fighters. Consequently, no NATO codename was ever allocated.
Alas, the future of the Soviet, carrier-borne fixed wing aircraft was not bright: Laid down in in 1970, the Kiev-class aircraft carriers (also known as Project 1143 or as the Krechyet (Gyrfalcon) class) were the first class of fixed-wing aircraft carriers to be built in the Soviet Union, and they entered service, together with the Yak-38 (Forger) VTOL fighter, in 1973. This weapon system already offered a combat performance similar to the MiG-SK, and the VTOL concept rendered the need for catapult launch and deck landing capability obsolete.
OKB MiG still tried to lobby for a CTOL aircraft (in the meantime, the swing-wing MiG-23 was on the drawing board, as well as a projected, navalized multi-purpose derivative, the MiG-23K), but to no avail.
Furthermore, carrier Project 1153 was cancelled in October 1978 as being too expensive, and a program for a smaller ship called Project 11435, more V/STOL-aircraft-oriented, was developed instead; in its initial stage, a version of 65,000 tons and 52 aircraft was proposed, but eventually an even smaller ship was built in the form of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers in 1985, outfitted with a 12-degree ski-jump bow flight deck instead of using complex aircraft catapults. This CTOL carrier was finally equipped with navalized Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft – and the MiG-SK paved the early way to these shipboard fighters, especially the MiG-29K.
General characteristics:
Crew: One
Length: 13.28 m (43 ft 6 in)
Wingspan: 10.39 m (34 ft)
Height: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Wing area: 22.6 m² (242.5 ft²)
Empty weight: 5.172 kg (11,392 lb)
Max. take-off weight: 7,560 kg (16,632 lb)
Powerplant:
2× Sorokin R3M-28 turbojets afterburning turbojets, rated at 33.8 kN (7,605 lbf) each
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,145 km/h (618 knots, 711 mph) at 3,000 m (10,000 ft)
Range: 2,060 km (1,111 nmi, 1,280 mi) with drop tanks
Service ceiling: 17,500 m (57,400 ft)
Rate of climb: 180 m/s (35,425 ft/min)
Wing loading: 302.4 kg/m² (61.6 lb/ft²)
Thrust/weight: 0.86
Armament:
2x 30 mm NR-30 cannons in the wing roots with 75 RPG
4x underwing pylons, with a maximum load of 1.000 kg (2.205 lb)
The kit and its assembly:
This kitbash creation was spawned by thoughts concerning the Soviet Naval Aviation and its lack of CTOL aircraft carriers until the 1980ies and kicked-off by a CG rendition of a navalized MiG-17 from fellow member SPINNERS at whatifmodelers.com, posted a couple of months ago. I liked this idea, and at first I wanted to convert a MiG-17 with a solid nose as a dedicated carrier aircraft. But the more I thought about it and did historic research, the less probable this concept appeared to me: the MiG-17 was simply too old to match Soviet plans for a carrier ship, at least with the real world as reference.
A plausible alternative was the MiG-19, esp. with its twin-engine layout, even though the highly swept wings and the associated high start and landing speeds would be rather inappropriate for a shipborne fighter. Anyway, a MiG-21 was even less suitable, and I eventually took the Farmer as conversion basis, since it would also fit into the historic time frame between the late 60ies and the mid-70ies.
In this case, the basis is a Plastyk MiG-19 kit, one of the many Eastern European re-incarnations of the vintage KP kit. This cheap re-issue became a positive surprise, because any former raised panel and rivet details have disappeared and were replaced with sound, recessed engravings. The kit is still a bit clumsy, the walls are very thick (esp. the canopy – maybe 2mm!), but IMHO it’s a considerable improvement with acceptable fit, even though there are some sink holes and some nasty surprises (in my case, for instance, the stabilizer fins would not match with the rear fuselage at all, and you basically need putty everywhere).
Not much from the Plastyk kit was taken over, though: only the fuselage’s rear two-thirds were used, some landing gear parts as well as fin and the horizontal stabilizers. The latter were heavily modified and reduced in sweep in order to match new wings from a Hobby Boss MiG-15 (the parts were cut into three pieces each and then set back together again).
Furthermore, the complete front section from a Novo Supermarine Attacker was transplanted, because its short nose and the high cockpit are perfect parts for a carrier aircraft. The Attacker’s front end, including the air intakes, fits almost perfectly onto the round MiG-19 forward fuselage, only little body work was necessary. A complete cockpit tub and a new seat were implanted, as well as a front landing gear well and walls inside of the (otherwise empty) air intakes. The jet exhausts were drilled open, too, and afterburner dummies added. Simple jobs.
On the other side, the wings were trickier than expected. The MiG-19 kit comes with voluminous and massive wing root fairings, probably aerodynamic bodies for some area-ruling. I decided to keep them, but this caused some unexpected troubles…
The MiG-15 wings’ position, considerably further back due to the reduced sweep angle, was deduced from the relative MiG-19’s landing gear position. A lot of sculpting and body work followed, and after the wings were finally in place I recognized that the aforementioned, thick wing root fairings had reduced the wing sweep – basically not a bad thing, but with the inconvenient side effect that the original wing MiG-15 fences were not parallel to the fuselage anymore, looking rather awkward! What to do? Grrrr…. I could not leave it that way, so I scraped them away and replaced with them with four scratched substitutes (from styrene profiles), moving the outer pair towards the wing folding mechanism.
Under the wings, four new pylons were added (two from an IAI Kfir, two from a Su-22) and the ordnance gathered from the scrap box – bombs and rocket pods formerly belonged to a Kangnam/Revell Yak-38.
The landing gear was raised by ~2mm for a higher stance on the ground. The original, thick central fin was reduced in length, so that it could become a plausible attachment point for an arrester hook (also from the spares box), and a pair of splayed stabilizer fins was added as a compensation. Finally, some of the OOB air scoops were placed all round the hull and some pitots, antennae and a gun camera fairing added.
Painting and markings:
This whif was to look naval at first sight, so I referred to the early Yak-38 VTOL aircraft and their rather minimalistic paint scheme in an overall dull blue. The green underside, seen on many service aircraft, was AFAIK a (later) protective coating – an obsolete detail for a CTOL aircraft.
Hence, all upper surfaces and the fuselage were painted in a uniform “Field Blue” (Tamiya XF-50). It’s a bit dark, but I have used this unique, petrol blue tone many moons ago on a real world Kangnam Forger where it looks pretty good, and in this case the surface was furthermore shaded with Humbrol 96 and 126 after a black in wash.
For some contrast I painted the undersides of the wings and stabilizers as well as a fuselage section between the wings in a pale grey (Humbrol 167), seen on one of the Yak-38 prototypes. Not very obvious, but at least the aircraft did not end up in a boring, uniform color.
The interior was painted in blue-gray (PRU Blue, shaded with Humbrol 87) while the landing gear wells became Aluminum (Humbrol 56). The wheel discs became bright green, just in order to keep in style and as a colorful contrast, and some di-electric panels and covers became very light grey or bright green. For some color contrast, the anti-flutter weight tips on the stabilizers as well as the pylons’ front ends were painted bright red.
The markings/decals reflect the early Soviet Navy style, with simple Red Stars, large yellow tactical codes and some high contrast warning stencils, taken from the remains of a Yak-38 sheet (American Revell re-release of the Kangnam kit).
Finally, after some soot stains with graphite around the gun muzzles and the air bleed doors, the kit was sealed with a coat of semi-matt acrylic varnish and some matt accents (anti-glare panel, radomes).
A simple idea that turned out to be more complex than expected, due to the wing fence troubles. But I am happy that the Attacker nose could be so easily transplanted, it changes the MiG-19’s look considerably, as well as the wings with (much) less sweep angle.
The aircraft looks familiar, but you only recognize at second glance that it is more than just a MiG-19 with a solid nose. The thing looks pretty retro, reminds me a bit of the Supermarine Scimitar (dunno?), and IMHO it appears more Chinese than Soviet (maybe because the layout reminds a lot of the Q-5 fighter bomber)? It could even, with appropriate markings, be a Luft ’46 design?
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
After the success of the Soviet Union’s first carrier ship, the Moskva Class (Projekt 1123, also called „Кондор“/„Kondor“) cruisers in the mid 1960s, the country became more ambitious. This resulted in Project 1153 Orel (Russian: Орёл, Eagle), a planned 1970s-era Soviet program to give the Soviet Navy a true blue water aviation capability. Project Orel would have resulted in a program very similar to the aircraft carriers available to the U.S. Navy. The ship would have been about 75-80,000 tons displacement, with a nuclear power plant and carried about 70 aircraft launched via steam catapults – the first Soviet aircraft carrier that would be able to deploy fixed-wing aircraft.
Beyond this core capability, the Orel carrier was designed with a large offensive capability with the ship mounts including 24 vertical launch tubes for anti-ship cruise missiles. In the USSR it was actually classified as the "large cruiser with aircraft armament".
Anyway, the carrier needed appropriate aircraft, and in order to develop a the aircraft major design bureaus were asked to submit ideas and proposals in 1959. OKB Yakovlev and MiG responded. While Yakovlev concentrated on the Yak-36 VTOL design that could also be deployed aboard of smaller ships without catapult and arrester equipment, Mikoyan-Gurevich looked at navalized variants of existing or projected aircraft.
While land-based fighters went through a remarkable performance improvement during the 60ies, OKB MiG considered a robust aircraft with proven systems and – foremost – two engines to be the best start for the Soviet Union’s first naval fighter. “Learning by doing”, the gathered experience would then be used in a dedicated new design that would be ready in the mid 70ies when Project 1153 was ready for service, too.
Internally designated “I-SK” or “SK-01” (Samolyot Korabelniy = carrier-borne aircraft), the naval fighter was based on the MiG-19 (NATO: Farmer), which had been in production in the USSR since 1954.
Faster and more modern types like the MiG-21 were rejected for a naval conversion because of their poor take-off performance, uncertain aerodynamics in the naval environment and lack of ruggedness. The MiG-19 also offered the benefit of relatively compact dimensions, as well as a structure that would carry the desired two engines.
Several innovations had to be addresses:
- A new wing for improved low speed handling
- Improvement of the landing gear and internal structures for carrier operations
- Development of a wing folding mechanism
- Integration of arrester hook and catapult launch devices into the structure
- Protection of structure, engine and equipment from the aggressive naval environment
- Improvement of the pilot’s field of view for carrier landings
- Improved avionics, esp. for navigation
Work on the SK-01 started in 1960, and by 1962 a heavily redesigned MiG-19 was ready as a mock-up for inspection and further approval. The “new” aircraft shared the outlines with the land-based MiG-19, but the nose section was completely new and shared a certain similarity to the experimental “Aircraft SN”, a MiG-17 derivative with side air intakes and a solid nose that carried a. Unlike the latter, the cockpit had been moved forward, which offered, together with an enlarged canopy and a short nose, an excellent field of view for the pilot.
On the SK-01 the air intakes with short splitter plates were re-located to the fuselage flanks underneath the cockpit. In order to avoid gun smoke ingestion problems (and the lack of space in the nose for any equipment except for a small SRD-3 Grad gun ranging radar, coupled with an ASP-5N computing gun-sight), the SK-01’s internal armament, a pair of NR-30 cannon, was placed in the wing roots.
The wing itself was another major modification, it featured a reduced sweep of only 33° at ¼ chord angle (compared to the MiG-19’s original 55°). Four wing hardpoints, outside of the landing gear wells, could carry a modest ordnance payload, including rocket and gun pods, unguided missiles, iron bombs and up to four Vympel K-13 AAMs.
Outside of these pylons, the wings featured a folding mechanism that allowed the wing span to be reduced from 10 m to 6.5 m for stowage. The fin remained unchanged, but the stabilizers had a reduced sweep, too.
The single ventral fin of the MiG-19 gave way to a fairing for a massive, semi-retractable arrester hook, flanked by a pair of smaller fins. The landing gear was beefed up, too, with a stronger suspension. Catapult launch from deck was to be realized through expandable cables that were attached onto massive hooks under the fuselage.
The SK-01 received a “thumbs up” in March 1962 and three prototypes, powered by special Sorokin R3M-28 engines, derivatives of the MiG-19's RB-9 that were adapted to the naval environment, were created and tested until 1965, when the type – now designated MiG-SK – went through State Acceptance Trials, including simulated landing tests on an “unsinkalble carrier” dummy, a modified part of the runway at Air Base at the Western coast of the Caspian Sea. Not only flight tests were conducted at Kaspiysk, but also different layouts for landing cables were tested and optimized as well. Furthermore, on a special platform at the coast, an experimental steam catapult went through trials, even though no aircraft starts were made from it – but weights hauled out into the sea.
Anyway, the flight tests and the landing performance on the simulated carrier deck were successful, and while the MiG-SK (the machine differed from the MiG-19 so much that it was not recognized as an official MiG-19 variant) was not an outstanding combat aircraft, rather a technology carrier with field use capabilities.
The MiG-SK’s performance was good enough to earn OKB MiG an initial production run of 20 aircraft, primarily intended for training and development units, since the whole infrastructure and procedures for naval aviation from a carrier had to be developed from scratch. These machines were built at slow pace until 1968 and trials were carried out in the vicinity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The MiG-SK successfully remained hidden from the public, since the Soviet Navy did not want to give away its plans for a CTOL carrier. Spy flights of balloons and aircraft recognized the MiG-SK, but the type was mistaken as MiG-17 fighters. Consequently, no NATO codename was ever allocated.
Alas, the future of the Soviet, carrier-borne fixed wing aircraft was not bright: Laid down in in 1970, the Kiev-class aircraft carriers (also known as Project 1143 or as the Krechyet (Gyrfalcon) class) were the first class of fixed-wing aircraft carriers to be built in the Soviet Union, and they entered service, together with the Yak-38 (Forger) VTOL fighter, in 1973. This weapon system already offered a combat performance similar to the MiG-SK, and the VTOL concept rendered the need for catapult launch and deck landing capability obsolete.
OKB MiG still tried to lobby for a CTOL aircraft (in the meantime, the swing-wing MiG-23 was on the drawing board, as well as a projected, navalized multi-purpose derivative, the MiG-23K), but to no avail.
Furthermore, carrier Project 1153 was cancelled in October 1978 as being too expensive, and a program for a smaller ship called Project 11435, more V/STOL-aircraft-oriented, was developed instead; in its initial stage, a version of 65,000 tons and 52 aircraft was proposed, but eventually an even smaller ship was built in the form of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers in 1985, outfitted with a 12-degree ski-jump bow flight deck instead of using complex aircraft catapults. This CTOL carrier was finally equipped with navalized Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft – and the MiG-SK paved the early way to these shipboard fighters, especially the MiG-29K.
General characteristics:
Crew: One
Length: 13.28 m (43 ft 6 in)
Wingspan: 10.39 m (34 ft)
Height: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Wing area: 22.6 m² (242.5 ft²)
Empty weight: 5.172 kg (11,392 lb)
Max. take-off weight: 7,560 kg (16,632 lb)
Powerplant:
2× Sorokin R3M-28 turbojets afterburning turbojets, rated at 33.8 kN (7,605 lbf) each
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,145 km/h (618 knots, 711 mph) at 3,000 m (10,000 ft)
Range: 2,060 km (1,111 nmi, 1,280 mi) with drop tanks
Service ceiling: 17,500 m (57,400 ft)
Rate of climb: 180 m/s (35,425 ft/min)
Wing loading: 302.4 kg/m² (61.6 lb/ft²)
Thrust/weight: 0.86
Armament:
2x 30 mm NR-30 cannons in the wing roots with 75 RPG
4x underwing pylons, with a maximum load of 1.000 kg (2.205 lb)
The kit and its assembly:
This kitbash creation was spawned by thoughts concerning the Soviet Naval Aviation and its lack of CTOL aircraft carriers until the 1980ies and kicked-off by a CG rendition of a navalized MiG-17 from fellow member SPINNERS at whatifmodelers.com, posted a couple of months ago. I liked this idea, and at first I wanted to convert a MiG-17 with a solid nose as a dedicated carrier aircraft. But the more I thought about it and did historic research, the less probable this concept appeared to me: the MiG-17 was simply too old to match Soviet plans for a carrier ship, at least with the real world as reference.
A plausible alternative was the MiG-19, esp. with its twin-engine layout, even though the highly swept wings and the associated high start and landing speeds would be rather inappropriate for a shipborne fighter. Anyway, a MiG-21 was even less suitable, and I eventually took the Farmer as conversion basis, since it would also fit into the historic time frame between the late 60ies and the mid-70ies.
In this case, the basis is a Plastyk MiG-19 kit, one of the many Eastern European re-incarnations of the vintage KP kit. This cheap re-issue became a positive surprise, because any former raised panel and rivet details have disappeared and were replaced with sound, recessed engravings. The kit is still a bit clumsy, the walls are very thick (esp. the canopy – maybe 2mm!), but IMHO it’s a considerable improvement with acceptable fit, even though there are some sink holes and some nasty surprises (in my case, for instance, the stabilizer fins would not match with the rear fuselage at all, and you basically need putty everywhere).
Not much from the Plastyk kit was taken over, though: only the fuselage’s rear two-thirds were used, some landing gear parts as well as fin and the horizontal stabilizers. The latter were heavily modified and reduced in sweep in order to match new wings from a Hobby Boss MiG-15 (the parts were cut into three pieces each and then set back together again).
Furthermore, the complete front section from a Novo Supermarine Attacker was transplanted, because its short nose and the high cockpit are perfect parts for a carrier aircraft. The Attacker’s front end, including the air intakes, fits almost perfectly onto the round MiG-19 forward fuselage, only little body work was necessary. A complete cockpit tub and a new seat were implanted, as well as a front landing gear well and walls inside of the (otherwise empty) air intakes. The jet exhausts were drilled open, too, and afterburner dummies added. Simple jobs.
On the other side, the wings were trickier than expected. The MiG-19 kit comes with voluminous and massive wing root fairings, probably aerodynamic bodies for some area-ruling. I decided to keep them, but this caused some unexpected troubles…
The MiG-15 wings’ position, considerably further back due to the reduced sweep angle, was deduced from the relative MiG-19’s landing gear position. A lot of sculpting and body work followed, and after the wings were finally in place I recognized that the aforementioned, thick wing root fairings had reduced the wing sweep – basically not a bad thing, but with the inconvenient side effect that the original wing MiG-15 fences were not parallel to the fuselage anymore, looking rather awkward! What to do? Grrrr…. I could not leave it that way, so I scraped them away and replaced with them with four scratched substitutes (from styrene profiles), moving the outer pair towards the wing folding mechanism.
Under the wings, four new pylons were added (two from an IAI Kfir, two from a Su-22) and the ordnance gathered from the scrap box – bombs and rocket pods formerly belonged to a Kangnam/Revell Yak-38.
The landing gear was raised by ~2mm for a higher stance on the ground. The original, thick central fin was reduced in length, so that it could become a plausible attachment point for an arrester hook (also from the spares box), and a pair of splayed stabilizer fins was added as a compensation. Finally, some of the OOB air scoops were placed all round the hull and some pitots, antennae and a gun camera fairing added.
Painting and markings:
This whif was to look naval at first sight, so I referred to the early Yak-38 VTOL aircraft and their rather minimalistic paint scheme in an overall dull blue. The green underside, seen on many service aircraft, was AFAIK a (later) protective coating – an obsolete detail for a CTOL aircraft.
Hence, all upper surfaces and the fuselage were painted in a uniform “Field Blue” (Tamiya XF-50). It’s a bit dark, but I have used this unique, petrol blue tone many moons ago on a real world Kangnam Forger where it looks pretty good, and in this case the surface was furthermore shaded with Humbrol 96 and 126 after a black in wash.
For some contrast I painted the undersides of the wings and stabilizers as well as a fuselage section between the wings in a pale grey (Humbrol 167), seen on one of the Yak-38 prototypes. Not very obvious, but at least the aircraft did not end up in a boring, uniform color.
The interior was painted in blue-gray (PRU Blue, shaded with Humbrol 87) while the landing gear wells became Aluminum (Humbrol 56). The wheel discs became bright green, just in order to keep in style and as a colorful contrast, and some di-electric panels and covers became very light grey or bright green. For some color contrast, the anti-flutter weight tips on the stabilizers as well as the pylons’ front ends were painted bright red.
The markings/decals reflect the early Soviet Navy style, with simple Red Stars, large yellow tactical codes and some high contrast warning stencils, taken from the remains of a Yak-38 sheet (American Revell re-release of the Kangnam kit).
Finally, after some soot stains with graphite around the gun muzzles and the air bleed doors, the kit was sealed with a coat of semi-matt acrylic varnish and some matt accents (anti-glare panel, radomes).
A simple idea that turned out to be more complex than expected, due to the wing fence troubles. But I am happy that the Attacker nose could be so easily transplanted, it changes the MiG-19’s look considerably, as well as the wings with (much) less sweep angle.
The aircraft looks familiar, but you only recognize at second glance that it is more than just a MiG-19 with a solid nose. The thing looks pretty retro, reminds me a bit of the Supermarine Scimitar (dunno?), and IMHO it appears more Chinese than Soviet (maybe because the layout reminds a lot of the Q-5 fighter bomber)? It could even, with appropriate markings, be a Luft ’46 design?
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
After the success of the Soviet Union’s first carrier ship, the Moskva Class (Projekt 1123, also called „Кондор“/„Kondor“) cruisers in the mid 1960s, the country became more ambitious. This resulted in Project 1153 Orel (Russian: Орёл, Eagle), a planned 1970s-era Soviet program to give the Soviet Navy a true blue water aviation capability. Project Orel would have resulted in a program very similar to the aircraft carriers available to the U.S. Navy. The ship would have been about 75-80,000 tons displacement, with a nuclear power plant and carried about 70 aircraft launched via steam catapults – the first Soviet aircraft carrier that would be able to deploy fixed-wing aircraft.
Beyond this core capability, the Orel carrier was designed with a large offensive capability with the ship mounts including 24 vertical launch tubes for anti-ship cruise missiles. In the USSR it was actually classified as the "large cruiser with aircraft armament".
Anyway, the carrier needed appropriate aircraft, and in order to develop a the aircraft major design bureaus were asked to submit ideas and proposals in 1959. OKB Yakovlev and MiG responded. While Yakovlev concentrated on the Yak-36 VTOL design that could also be deployed aboard of smaller ships without catapult and arrester equipment, Mikoyan-Gurevich looked at navalized variants of existing or projected aircraft.
While land-based fighters went through a remarkable performance improvement during the 60ies, OKB MiG considered a robust aircraft with proven systems and – foremost – two engines to be the best start for the Soviet Union’s first naval fighter. “Learning by doing”, the gathered experience would then be used in a dedicated new design that would be ready in the mid 70ies when Project 1153 was ready for service, too.
Internally designated “I-SK” or “SK-01” (Samolyot Korabelniy = carrier-borne aircraft), the naval fighter was based on the MiG-19 (NATO: Farmer), which had been in production in the USSR since 1954.
Faster and more modern types like the MiG-21 were rejected for a naval conversion because of their poor take-off performance, uncertain aerodynamics in the naval environment and lack of ruggedness. The MiG-19 also offered the benefit of relatively compact dimensions, as well as a structure that would carry the desired two engines.
Several innovations had to be addresses:
- A new wing for improved low speed handling
- Improvement of the landing gear and internal structures for carrier operations
- Development of a wing folding mechanism
- Integration of arrester hook and catapult launch devices into the structure
- Protection of structure, engine and equipment from the aggressive naval environment
- Improvement of the pilot’s field of view for carrier landings
- Improved avionics, esp. for navigation
Work on the SK-01 started in 1960, and by 1962 a heavily redesigned MiG-19 was ready as a mock-up for inspection and further approval. The “new” aircraft shared the outlines with the land-based MiG-19, but the nose section was completely new and shared a certain similarity to the experimental “Aircraft SN”, a MiG-17 derivative with side air intakes and a solid nose that carried a. Unlike the latter, the cockpit had been moved forward, which offered, together with an enlarged canopy and a short nose, an excellent field of view for the pilot.
On the SK-01 the air intakes with short splitter plates were re-located to the fuselage flanks underneath the cockpit. In order to avoid gun smoke ingestion problems (and the lack of space in the nose for any equipment except for a small SRD-3 Grad gun ranging radar, coupled with an ASP-5N computing gun-sight), the SK-01’s internal armament, a pair of NR-30 cannon, was placed in the wing roots.
The wing itself was another major modification, it featured a reduced sweep of only 33° at ¼ chord angle (compared to the MiG-19’s original 55°). Four wing hardpoints, outside of the landing gear wells, could carry a modest ordnance payload, including rocket and gun pods, unguided missiles, iron bombs and up to four Vympel K-13 AAMs.
Outside of these pylons, the wings featured a folding mechanism that allowed the wing span to be reduced from 10 m to 6.5 m for stowage. The fin remained unchanged, but the stabilizers had a reduced sweep, too.
The single ventral fin of the MiG-19 gave way to a fairing for a massive, semi-retractable arrester hook, flanked by a pair of smaller fins. The landing gear was beefed up, too, with a stronger suspension. Catapult launch from deck was to be realized through expandable cables that were attached onto massive hooks under the fuselage.
The SK-01 received a “thumbs up” in March 1962 and three prototypes, powered by special Sorokin R3M-28 engines, derivatives of the MiG-19's RB-9 that were adapted to the naval environment, were created and tested until 1965, when the type – now designated MiG-SK – went through State Acceptance Trials, including simulated landing tests on an “unsinkalble carrier” dummy, a modified part of the runway at Air Base at the Western coast of the Caspian Sea. Not only flight tests were conducted at Kaspiysk, but also different layouts for landing cables were tested and optimized as well. Furthermore, on a special platform at the coast, an experimental steam catapult went through trials, even though no aircraft starts were made from it – but weights hauled out into the sea.
Anyway, the flight tests and the landing performance on the simulated carrier deck were successful, and while the MiG-SK (the machine differed from the MiG-19 so much that it was not recognized as an official MiG-19 variant) was not an outstanding combat aircraft, rather a technology carrier with field use capabilities.
The MiG-SK’s performance was good enough to earn OKB MiG an initial production run of 20 aircraft, primarily intended for training and development units, since the whole infrastructure and procedures for naval aviation from a carrier had to be developed from scratch. These machines were built at slow pace until 1968 and trials were carried out in the vicinity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The MiG-SK successfully remained hidden from the public, since the Soviet Navy did not want to give away its plans for a CTOL carrier. Spy flights of balloons and aircraft recognized the MiG-SK, but the type was mistaken as MiG-17 fighters. Consequently, no NATO codename was ever allocated.
Alas, the future of the Soviet, carrier-borne fixed wing aircraft was not bright: Laid down in in 1970, the Kiev-class aircraft carriers (also known as Project 1143 or as the Krechyet (Gyrfalcon) class) were the first class of fixed-wing aircraft carriers to be built in the Soviet Union, and they entered service, together with the Yak-38 (Forger) VTOL fighter, in 1973. This weapon system already offered a combat performance similar to the MiG-SK, and the VTOL concept rendered the need for catapult launch and deck landing capability obsolete.
OKB MiG still tried to lobby for a CTOL aircraft (in the meantime, the swing-wing MiG-23 was on the drawing board, as well as a projected, navalized multi-purpose derivative, the MiG-23K), but to no avail.
Furthermore, carrier Project 1153 was cancelled in October 1978 as being too expensive, and a program for a smaller ship called Project 11435, more V/STOL-aircraft-oriented, was developed instead; in its initial stage, a version of 65,000 tons and 52 aircraft was proposed, but eventually an even smaller ship was built in the form of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers in 1985, outfitted with a 12-degree ski-jump bow flight deck instead of using complex aircraft catapults. This CTOL carrier was finally equipped with navalized Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft – and the MiG-SK paved the early way to these shipboard fighters, especially the MiG-29K.
General characteristics:
Crew: One
Length: 13.28 m (43 ft 6 in)
Wingspan: 10.39 m (34 ft)
Height: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Wing area: 22.6 m² (242.5 ft²)
Empty weight: 5.172 kg (11,392 lb)
Max. take-off weight: 7,560 kg (16,632 lb)
Powerplant:
2× Sorokin R3M-28 turbojets afterburning turbojets, rated at 33.8 kN (7,605 lbf) each
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,145 km/h (618 knots, 711 mph) at 3,000 m (10,000 ft)
Range: 2,060 km (1,111 nmi, 1,280 mi) with drop tanks
Service ceiling: 17,500 m (57,400 ft)
Rate of climb: 180 m/s (35,425 ft/min)
Wing loading: 302.4 kg/m² (61.6 lb/ft²)
Thrust/weight: 0.86
Armament:
2x 30 mm NR-30 cannons in the wing roots with 75 RPG
4x underwing pylons, with a maximum load of 1.000 kg (2.205 lb)
The kit and its assembly:
This kitbash creation was spawned by thoughts concerning the Soviet Naval Aviation and its lack of CTOL aircraft carriers until the 1980ies and kicked-off by a CG rendition of a navalized MiG-17 from fellow member SPINNERS at whatifmodelers.com, posted a couple of months ago. I liked this idea, and at first I wanted to convert a MiG-17 with a solid nose as a dedicated carrier aircraft. But the more I thought about it and did historic research, the less probable this concept appeared to me: the MiG-17 was simply too old to match Soviet plans for a carrier ship, at least with the real world as reference.
A plausible alternative was the MiG-19, esp. with its twin-engine layout, even though the highly swept wings and the associated high start and landing speeds would be rather inappropriate for a shipborne fighter. Anyway, a MiG-21 was even less suitable, and I eventually took the Farmer as conversion basis, since it would also fit into the historic time frame between the late 60ies and the mid-70ies.
In this case, the basis is a Plastyk MiG-19 kit, one of the many Eastern European re-incarnations of the vintage KP kit. This cheap re-issue became a positive surprise, because any former raised panel and rivet details have disappeared and were replaced with sound, recessed engravings. The kit is still a bit clumsy, the walls are very thick (esp. the canopy – maybe 2mm!), but IMHO it’s a considerable improvement with acceptable fit, even though there are some sink holes and some nasty surprises (in my case, for instance, the stabilizer fins would not match with the rear fuselage at all, and you basically need putty everywhere).
Not much from the Plastyk kit was taken over, though: only the fuselage’s rear two-thirds were used, some landing gear parts as well as fin and the horizontal stabilizers. The latter were heavily modified and reduced in sweep in order to match new wings from a Hobby Boss MiG-15 (the parts were cut into three pieces each and then set back together again).
Furthermore, the complete front section from a Novo Supermarine Attacker was transplanted, because its short nose and the high cockpit are perfect parts for a carrier aircraft. The Attacker’s front end, including the air intakes, fits almost perfectly onto the round MiG-19 forward fuselage, only little body work was necessary. A complete cockpit tub and a new seat were implanted, as well as a front landing gear well and walls inside of the (otherwise empty) air intakes. The jet exhausts were drilled open, too, and afterburner dummies added. Simple jobs.
On the other side, the wings were trickier than expected. The MiG-19 kit comes with voluminous and massive wing root fairings, probably aerodynamic bodies for some area-ruling. I decided to keep them, but this caused some unexpected troubles…
The MiG-15 wings’ position, considerably further back due to the reduced sweep angle, was deduced from the relative MiG-19’s landing gear position. A lot of sculpting and body work followed, and after the wings were finally in place I recognized that the aforementioned, thick wing root fairings had reduced the wing sweep – basically not a bad thing, but with the inconvenient side effect that the original wing MiG-15 fences were not parallel to the fuselage anymore, looking rather awkward! What to do? Grrrr…. I could not leave it that way, so I scraped them away and replaced with them with four scratched substitutes (from styrene profiles), moving the outer pair towards the wing folding mechanism.
Under the wings, four new pylons were added (two from an IAI Kfir, two from a Su-22) and the ordnance gathered from the scrap box – bombs and rocket pods formerly belonged to a Kangnam/Revell Yak-38.
The landing gear was raised by ~2mm for a higher stance on the ground. The original, thick central fin was reduced in length, so that it could become a plausible attachment point for an arrester hook (also from the spares box), and a pair of splayed stabilizer fins was added as a compensation. Finally, some of the OOB air scoops were placed all round the hull and some pitots, antennae and a gun camera fairing added.
Painting and markings:
This whif was to look naval at first sight, so I referred to the early Yak-38 VTOL aircraft and their rather minimalistic paint scheme in an overall dull blue. The green underside, seen on many service aircraft, was AFAIK a (later) protective coating – an obsolete detail for a CTOL aircraft.
Hence, all upper surfaces and the fuselage were painted in a uniform “Field Blue” (Tamiya XF-50). It’s a bit dark, but I have used this unique, petrol blue tone many moons ago on a real world Kangnam Forger where it looks pretty good, and in this case the surface was furthermore shaded with Humbrol 96 and 126 after a black in wash.
For some contrast I painted the undersides of the wings and stabilizers as well as a fuselage section between the wings in a pale grey (Humbrol 167), seen on one of the Yak-38 prototypes. Not very obvious, but at least the aircraft did not end up in a boring, uniform color.
The interior was painted in blue-gray (PRU Blue, shaded with Humbrol 87) while the landing gear wells became Aluminum (Humbrol 56). The wheel discs became bright green, just in order to keep in style and as a colorful contrast, and some di-electric panels and covers became very light grey or bright green. For some color contrast, the anti-flutter weight tips on the stabilizers as well as the pylons’ front ends were painted bright red.
The markings/decals reflect the early Soviet Navy style, with simple Red Stars, large yellow tactical codes and some high contrast warning stencils, taken from the remains of a Yak-38 sheet (American Revell re-release of the Kangnam kit).
Finally, after some soot stains with graphite around the gun muzzles and the air bleed doors, the kit was sealed with a coat of semi-matt acrylic varnish and some matt accents (anti-glare panel, radomes).
A simple idea that turned out to be more complex than expected, due to the wing fence troubles. But I am happy that the Attacker nose could be so easily transplanted, it changes the MiG-19’s look considerably, as well as the wings with (much) less sweep angle.
The aircraft looks familiar, but you only recognize at second glance that it is more than just a MiG-19 with a solid nose. The thing looks pretty retro, reminds me a bit of the Supermarine Scimitar (dunno?), and IMHO it appears more Chinese than Soviet (maybe because the layout reminds a lot of the Q-5 fighter bomber)? It could even, with appropriate markings, be a Luft ’46 design?
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
After the success of the Soviet Union’s first carrier ship, the Moskva Class (Projekt 1123, also called „Кондор“/„Kondor“) cruisers in the mid 1960s, the country became more ambitious. This resulted in Project 1153 Orel (Russian: Орёл, Eagle), a planned 1970s-era Soviet program to give the Soviet Navy a true blue water aviation capability. Project Orel would have resulted in a program very similar to the aircraft carriers available to the U.S. Navy. The ship would have been about 75-80,000 tons displacement, with a nuclear power plant and carried about 70 aircraft launched via steam catapults – the first Soviet aircraft carrier that would be able to deploy fixed-wing aircraft.
Beyond this core capability, the Orel carrier was designed with a large offensive capability with the ship mounts including 24 vertical launch tubes for anti-ship cruise missiles. In the USSR it was actually classified as the "large cruiser with aircraft armament".
Anyway, the carrier needed appropriate aircraft, and in order to develop a the aircraft major design bureaus were asked to submit ideas and proposals in 1959. OKB Yakovlev and MiG responded. While Yakovlev concentrated on the Yak-36 VTOL design that could also be deployed aboard of smaller ships without catapult and arrester equipment, Mikoyan-Gurevich looked at navalized variants of existing or projected aircraft.
While land-based fighters went through a remarkable performance improvement during the 60ies, OKB MiG considered a robust aircraft with proven systems and – foremost – two engines to be the best start for the Soviet Union’s first naval fighter. “Learning by doing”, the gathered experience would then be used in a dedicated new design that would be ready in the mid 70ies when Project 1153 was ready for service, too.
Internally designated “I-SK” or “SK-01” (Samolyot Korabelniy = carrier-borne aircraft), the naval fighter was based on the MiG-19 (NATO: Farmer), which had been in production in the USSR since 1954.
Faster and more modern types like the MiG-21 were rejected for a naval conversion because of their poor take-off performance, uncertain aerodynamics in the naval environment and lack of ruggedness. The MiG-19 also offered the benefit of relatively compact dimensions, as well as a structure that would carry the desired two engines.
Several innovations had to be addresses:
- A new wing for improved low speed handling
- Improvement of the landing gear and internal structures for carrier operations
- Development of a wing folding mechanism
- Integration of arrester hook and catapult launch devices into the structure
- Protection of structure, engine and equipment from the aggressive naval environment
- Improvement of the pilot’s field of view for carrier landings
- Improved avionics, esp. for navigation
Work on the SK-01 started in 1960, and by 1962 a heavily redesigned MiG-19 was ready as a mock-up for inspection and further approval. The “new” aircraft shared the outlines with the land-based MiG-19, but the nose section was completely new and shared a certain similarity to the experimental “Aircraft SN”, a MiG-17 derivative with side air intakes and a solid nose that carried a. Unlike the latter, the cockpit had been moved forward, which offered, together with an enlarged canopy and a short nose, an excellent field of view for the pilot.
On the SK-01 the air intakes with short splitter plates were re-located to the fuselage flanks underneath the cockpit. In order to avoid gun smoke ingestion problems (and the lack of space in the nose for any equipment except for a small SRD-3 Grad gun ranging radar, coupled with an ASP-5N computing gun-sight), the SK-01’s internal armament, a pair of NR-30 cannon, was placed in the wing roots.
The wing itself was another major modification, it featured a reduced sweep of only 33° at ¼ chord angle (compared to the MiG-19’s original 55°). Four wing hardpoints, outside of the landing gear wells, could carry a modest ordnance payload, including rocket and gun pods, unguided missiles, iron bombs and up to four Vympel K-13 AAMs.
Outside of these pylons, the wings featured a folding mechanism that allowed the wing span to be reduced from 10 m to 6.5 m for stowage. The fin remained unchanged, but the stabilizers had a reduced sweep, too.
The single ventral fin of the MiG-19 gave way to a fairing for a massive, semi-retractable arrester hook, flanked by a pair of smaller fins. The landing gear was beefed up, too, with a stronger suspension. Catapult launch from deck was to be realized through expandable cables that were attached onto massive hooks under the fuselage.
The SK-01 received a “thumbs up” in March 1962 and three prototypes, powered by special Sorokin R3M-28 engines, derivatives of the MiG-19's RB-9 that were adapted to the naval environment, were created and tested until 1965, when the type – now designated MiG-SK – went through State Acceptance Trials, including simulated landing tests on an “unsinkalble carrier” dummy, a modified part of the runway at Air Base at the Western coast of the Caspian Sea. Not only flight tests were conducted at Kaspiysk, but also different layouts for landing cables were tested and optimized as well. Furthermore, on a special platform at the coast, an experimental steam catapult went through trials, even though no aircraft starts were made from it – but weights hauled out into the sea.
Anyway, the flight tests and the landing performance on the simulated carrier deck were successful, and while the MiG-SK (the machine differed from the MiG-19 so much that it was not recognized as an official MiG-19 variant) was not an outstanding combat aircraft, rather a technology carrier with field use capabilities.
The MiG-SK’s performance was good enough to earn OKB MiG an initial production run of 20 aircraft, primarily intended for training and development units, since the whole infrastructure and procedures for naval aviation from a carrier had to be developed from scratch. These machines were built at slow pace until 1968 and trials were carried out in the vicinity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The MiG-SK successfully remained hidden from the public, since the Soviet Navy did not want to give away its plans for a CTOL carrier. Spy flights of balloons and aircraft recognized the MiG-SK, but the type was mistaken as MiG-17 fighters. Consequently, no NATO codename was ever allocated.
Alas, the future of the Soviet, carrier-borne fixed wing aircraft was not bright: Laid down in in 1970, the Kiev-class aircraft carriers (also known as Project 1143 or as the Krechyet (Gyrfalcon) class) were the first class of fixed-wing aircraft carriers to be built in the Soviet Union, and they entered service, together with the Yak-38 (Forger) VTOL fighter, in 1973. This weapon system already offered a combat performance similar to the MiG-SK, and the VTOL concept rendered the need for catapult launch and deck landing capability obsolete.
OKB MiG still tried to lobby for a CTOL aircraft (in the meantime, the swing-wing MiG-23 was on the drawing board, as well as a projected, navalized multi-purpose derivative, the MiG-23K), but to no avail.
Furthermore, carrier Project 1153 was cancelled in October 1978 as being too expensive, and a program for a smaller ship called Project 11435, more V/STOL-aircraft-oriented, was developed instead; in its initial stage, a version of 65,000 tons and 52 aircraft was proposed, but eventually an even smaller ship was built in the form of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers in 1985, outfitted with a 12-degree ski-jump bow flight deck instead of using complex aircraft catapults. This CTOL carrier was finally equipped with navalized Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft – and the MiG-SK paved the early way to these shipboard fighters, especially the MiG-29K.
General characteristics:
Crew: One
Length: 13.28 m (43 ft 6 in)
Wingspan: 10.39 m (34 ft)
Height: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Wing area: 22.6 m² (242.5 ft²)
Empty weight: 5.172 kg (11,392 lb)
Max. take-off weight: 7,560 kg (16,632 lb)
Powerplant:
2× Sorokin R3M-28 turbojets afterburning turbojets, rated at 33.8 kN (7,605 lbf) each
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,145 km/h (618 knots, 711 mph) at 3,000 m (10,000 ft)
Range: 2,060 km (1,111 nmi, 1,280 mi) with drop tanks
Service ceiling: 17,500 m (57,400 ft)
Rate of climb: 180 m/s (35,425 ft/min)
Wing loading: 302.4 kg/m² (61.6 lb/ft²)
Thrust/weight: 0.86
Armament:
2x 30 mm NR-30 cannons in the wing roots with 75 RPG
4x underwing pylons, with a maximum load of 1.000 kg (2.205 lb)
The kit and its assembly:
This kitbash creation was spawned by thoughts concerning the Soviet Naval Aviation and its lack of CTOL aircraft carriers until the 1980ies and kicked-off by a CG rendition of a navalized MiG-17 from fellow member SPINNERS at whatifmodelers.com, posted a couple of months ago. I liked this idea, and at first I wanted to convert a MiG-17 with a solid nose as a dedicated carrier aircraft. But the more I thought about it and did historic research, the less probable this concept appeared to me: the MiG-17 was simply too old to match Soviet plans for a carrier ship, at least with the real world as reference.
A plausible alternative was the MiG-19, esp. with its twin-engine layout, even though the highly swept wings and the associated high start and landing speeds would be rather inappropriate for a shipborne fighter. Anyway, a MiG-21 was even less suitable, and I eventually took the Farmer as conversion basis, since it would also fit into the historic time frame between the late 60ies and the mid-70ies.
In this case, the basis is a Plastyk MiG-19 kit, one of the many Eastern European re-incarnations of the vintage KP kit. This cheap re-issue became a positive surprise, because any former raised panel and rivet details have disappeared and were replaced with sound, recessed engravings. The kit is still a bit clumsy, the walls are very thick (esp. the canopy – maybe 2mm!), but IMHO it’s a considerable improvement with acceptable fit, even though there are some sink holes and some nasty surprises (in my case, for instance, the stabilizer fins would not match with the rear fuselage at all, and you basically need putty everywhere).
Not much from the Plastyk kit was taken over, though: only the fuselage’s rear two-thirds were used, some landing gear parts as well as fin and the horizontal stabilizers. The latter were heavily modified and reduced in sweep in order to match new wings from a Hobby Boss MiG-15 (the parts were cut into three pieces each and then set back together again).
Furthermore, the complete front section from a Novo Supermarine Attacker was transplanted, because its short nose and the high cockpit are perfect parts for a carrier aircraft. The Attacker’s front end, including the air intakes, fits almost perfectly onto the round MiG-19 forward fuselage, only little body work was necessary. A complete cockpit tub and a new seat were implanted, as well as a front landing gear well and walls inside of the (otherwise empty) air intakes. The jet exhausts were drilled open, too, and afterburner dummies added. Simple jobs.
On the other side, the wings were trickier than expected. The MiG-19 kit comes with voluminous and massive wing root fairings, probably aerodynamic bodies for some area-ruling. I decided to keep them, but this caused some unexpected troubles…
The MiG-15 wings’ position, considerably further back due to the reduced sweep angle, was deduced from the relative MiG-19’s landing gear position. A lot of sculpting and body work followed, and after the wings were finally in place I recognized that the aforementioned, thick wing root fairings had reduced the wing sweep – basically not a bad thing, but with the inconvenient side effect that the original wing MiG-15 fences were not parallel to the fuselage anymore, looking rather awkward! What to do? Grrrr…. I could not leave it that way, so I scraped them away and replaced with them with four scratched substitutes (from styrene profiles), moving the outer pair towards the wing folding mechanism.
Under the wings, four new pylons were added (two from an IAI Kfir, two from a Su-22) and the ordnance gathered from the scrap box – bombs and rocket pods formerly belonged to a Kangnam/Revell Yak-38.
The landing gear was raised by ~2mm for a higher stance on the ground. The original, thick central fin was reduced in length, so that it could become a plausible attachment point for an arrester hook (also from the spares box), and a pair of splayed stabilizer fins was added as a compensation. Finally, some of the OOB air scoops were placed all round the hull and some pitots, antennae and a gun camera fairing added.
Painting and markings:
This whif was to look naval at first sight, so I referred to the early Yak-38 VTOL aircraft and their rather minimalistic paint scheme in an overall dull blue. The green underside, seen on many service aircraft, was AFAIK a (later) protective coating – an obsolete detail for a CTOL aircraft.
Hence, all upper surfaces and the fuselage were painted in a uniform “Field Blue” (Tamiya XF-50). It’s a bit dark, but I have used this unique, petrol blue tone many moons ago on a real world Kangnam Forger where it looks pretty good, and in this case the surface was furthermore shaded with Humbrol 96 and 126 after a black in wash.
For some contrast I painted the undersides of the wings and stabilizers as well as a fuselage section between the wings in a pale grey (Humbrol 167), seen on one of the Yak-38 prototypes. Not very obvious, but at least the aircraft did not end up in a boring, uniform color.
The interior was painted in blue-gray (PRU Blue, shaded with Humbrol 87) while the landing gear wells became Aluminum (Humbrol 56). The wheel discs became bright green, just in order to keep in style and as a colorful contrast, and some di-electric panels and covers became very light grey or bright green. For some color contrast, the anti-flutter weight tips on the stabilizers as well as the pylons’ front ends were painted bright red.
The markings/decals reflect the early Soviet Navy style, with simple Red Stars, large yellow tactical codes and some high contrast warning stencils, taken from the remains of a Yak-38 sheet (American Revell re-release of the Kangnam kit).
Finally, after some soot stains with graphite around the gun muzzles and the air bleed doors, the kit was sealed with a coat of semi-matt acrylic varnish and some matt accents (anti-glare panel, radomes).
A simple idea that turned out to be more complex than expected, due to the wing fence troubles. But I am happy that the Attacker nose could be so easily transplanted, it changes the MiG-19’s look considerably, as well as the wings with (much) less sweep angle.
The aircraft looks familiar, but you only recognize at second glance that it is more than just a MiG-19 with a solid nose. The thing looks pretty retro, reminds me a bit of the Supermarine Scimitar (dunno?), and IMHO it appears more Chinese than Soviet (maybe because the layout reminds a lot of the Q-5 fighter bomber)? It could even, with appropriate markings, be a Luft ’46 design?
CAPTION: "Community gardeners working the Keya Wakpala Garden, part of the Sicangu Community Development Corporation (CDC) Food Sovereignty Initiative."
NRCS ARTICLE 4/2020: There’s a sense of pride that comes with doing something for yourself, and growing food is a major part of being self-sustaining, healthy and whole.
A one-acre community garden on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota is connecting tribal members with the land, with food, and with their past.
“It’s about food sovereignty. It’s about having the choice of where and how you get your food, knowing how to feed yourself,” said Matte Wilson. “If that grocery store wasn’t here, would you know how to feed yourself and your family?”
Born and raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wilson is now director of the recently re-branded Sicangu Community Development Corporation (CDC) Food Sovereignty Initiative. One of its major projects is the Keya Wakpala Garden. Since moving back home in 2018, food sovereignty has played a major part of Wilson’s life.
“It is something that really excites me, something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life,” he said.
Vegetable Harvest on table
The food sovereignty movement has gained significant momentum throughout the country in recent years and is largely being led by indigenous communities. According to Wilson, you don’t have to be indigenous to appreciate delicious, locally grown foods.
“Food has the power to bring people together – it’s always been an essential part of all of our social interactions, whether or not you are Lakota,” he said.
For Keya Wakpala garden manager Ed Her Many Horses, the garden and learning how to grow food has been nothing short of trans-formative.
“It’s impacted me in a lot of different ways,” he said. “It helped give me a reason to get up in the morning – it still does. There is so much to appreciate in the garden.”
But it’s more than food, he’s found. Caring for a garden fosters community. The Keya Wakpala Garden is a place where interns, volunteers, community members and children come together to work, and they take pride in the outcome.
“It’s a beacon of hope, I think,” Her Many Horses said.
The Boys and Girls Club brings kids to the garden where they can plant, pick vegetables and even harvest indigenous foods such as ceyaka, wild mint, in the nearby wetlands. They learn to identify foods as they’re grown and harvested, and follow up field work with cooking sessions. Starting with young kids, the project aims to make gardening and producing food something that’s second nature – something they’re able to pass on to future generations.
Learning by doing is key, according to Wilson.
“When they are able to see it in person and participate in the process, it is really powerful. It makes people appreciate food and agriculture more,” he said.
Garden Row signs in lakota
Foster Cournoyer-Hogan is a student at Stanford University from the Rosebud Indian Reservation who interned for the summer at the Keya Wakpala Garden. His additions to the garden plot included the signs that identified the plants with Lakota words. There was wagmu (squash), tinpsilazizi (carrots), phangi sasa (beets) and mastincatawote (lettuce).
Using the Lakota language is a way to stay connected to traditional culture. That’s especially important when children and elders visit the garden, he said.
Along with strengthening connections to culture and community, the garden is helping solve another issue on the reservation – addressing health challenges. Diabetes and diet related illness is high on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, but the produce from the garden gives people access to nourishing food.
“Our food is everything,” Cournoyer-Hogan said.
“Food is medicine,” added Wilson: “The way we treat our garden, the way we treat the land is how we treat ourselves … we take care of the land, and it takes care of us.”
The group has some expert resources when it comes to taking care of the land and the plants. Master Gardeners and university extension experts have volunteered their time and advice, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides support and funding through soil health programs.
The mission of NRCS is “helping people help the land.” That land usually refers to range land and farm acres, but the same programs and principles can apply to community gardens.
“We're trying to get people together to go back to some of the things that were important years ago to our people for self-sustainability,” said Mary Scott, a Rosebud Indian Reservation member and tribal liaison with NRCS.
Student gardner holding out herbs for the camera
The reservation’s growing environment presents some significant challenges. The garden site had been a conventional field, growing sunflowers, corn, soybeans and wheat. The heavy clay soils made it difficult to hold enough water for the garden, especially given the sloping hillside where it sits. Long, hot days would burn up the plants one day, and they next they’d be hit by torrential downpours, hail and wind.
“There are a lot of things outside of our control,” said Her Many Horses, “and that can be tough in such an extreme weather environment”
Rather than give up, however, the team has simply learned to adapt and make the most of what they have.
“We have to be really strategic about how we plan out our year to make the most of this short window,” Wilson said. “We have branched into utilizing some year-round growing structures to expand our season.”
The garden is tended with organic methods, using fish emulsion and compost for fertilizer. Local ranchers have donated hay bales – the more beaten-up and weather-worn the better. As ground cover, they help with weed control. Adding mulch or organic matter has helped break up the hard, clay soil and has been a huge asset for moisture retention as well.
We’re using a regenerative approach to agriculture,” said Her Many Horses. “We’re always trying to give back to our soil.
The garden also incorporates time-honored growing techniques of the tribal community. Produce is grown with the three sister’s method – beans, corn and squash grow in rows and benefit from one another.
“Beans help fertilize the soil by providing nitrogen,” Wilson explained. “The corn, when it grows up the stalk, the beans are able to wrap around the stalk, and the squash actually helps keep out pests and other weeds.”
7 workers talking in the garden
It’s one of many ways the garden is bringing the community back to its roots. It also brings youth and elders together, sharing a positive outlook while producing something for the whole community. It connects people with land and community, giving them knowledge to pass along wherever they go.
Sharing knowledge is a big part of the project, Scott said, because it’s how cultures and traditions are kept alive.
“Growing our own produce is very important, so that this community can become self-sustaining, not only as a people, but as a tribe,” she said.
The ultimate goal is to completely change the food system on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
“My vision is that our community becomes a food center where we have restaurants and food trucks sourcing their foods locally,” Wilson said, “and the garden is the first step to helping change our community mindset about food.”
But it goes even deeper than that.
“I hope that our community can be healthy and happy, that we can be sovereign,” said Her Many Horses. “And for us, that starts with everyone knowing where their food comes from.”
- Written by Janelle Atyeo
This is what you do if you blow an engine in the middle of nowhere.
I asked the owner if he had ever taken an engine apart before. “No, I’m learning by doing.” (loose translation)
Pretty sure I’d call AAA.
Cambodians are the ultimate in resource and creativity.
There’s a sense of pride that comes with doing something for yourself, and growing food is a major part of being self-sustaining, healthy and whole.
A one-acre community garden on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota is connecting tribal members with the land, with food, and with their past.
“It’s about food sovereignty. It’s about having the choice of where and how you get your food, knowing how to feed yourself,” said Matte Wilson. “If that grocery store wasn’t here, would you know how to feed yourself and your family?”
Born and raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wilson is now director of the recently re-branded Sicangu Community Development Corporation (CDC) Food Sovereignty Initiative. One of its major projects is the Keya Wakpala Garden. Since moving back home in 2018, food sovereignty has played a major part of Wilson’s life.
“It is something that really excites me, something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life,” he said.
Vegetable Harvest on table
The food sovereignty movement has gained significant momentum throughout the country in recent years and is largely being led by indigenous communities. According to Wilson, you don’t have to be indigenous to appreciate delicious, locally grown foods.
“Food has the power to bring people together – it’s always been an essential part of all of our social interactions, whether or not you are Lakota,” he said.
For Keya Wakpala garden manager Ed Her Many Horses, the garden and learning how to grow food has been nothing short of trans-formative.
“It’s impacted me in a lot of different ways,” he said. “It helped give me a reason to get up in the morning – it still does. There is so much to appreciate in the garden.”
But it’s more than food, he’s found. Caring for a garden fosters community. The Keya Wakpala Garden is a place where interns, volunteers, community members and children come together to work, and they take pride in the outcome.
“It’s a beacon of hope, I think,” Her Many Horses said.
The Boys and Girls Club brings kids to the garden where they can plant, pick vegetables and even harvest indigenous foods such as ceyaka, wild mint, in the nearby wetlands. They learn to identify foods as they’re grown and harvested, and follow up field work with cooking sessions. Starting with young kids, the project aims to make gardening and producing food something that’s second nature – something they’re able to pass on to future generations.
Learning by doing is key, according to Wilson.
“When they are able to see it in person and participate in the process, it is really powerful. It makes people appreciate food and agriculture more,” he said.
Garden Row signs in lakota
Foster Cournoyer-Hogan is a student at Stanford University from the Rosebud Indian Reservation who interned for the summer at the Keya Wakpala Garden. His additions to the garden plot included the signs that identified the plants with Lakota words. There was wagmu (squash), tinpsilazizi (carrots), phangi sasa (beets) and mastincatawote (lettuce).
Using the Lakota language is a way to stay connected to traditional culture. That’s especially important when children and elders visit the garden, he said.
Along with strengthening connections to culture and community, the garden is helping solve another issue on the reservation – addressing health challenges. Diabetes and diet related illness is high on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, but the produce from the garden gives people access to nourishing food.
“Our food is everything,” Cournoyer-Hogan said.
“Food is medicine,” added Wilson: “The way we treat our garden, the way we treat the land is how we treat ourselves … we take care of the land, and it takes care of us.”
The group has some expert resources when it comes to taking care of the land and the plants. Master Gardeners and university extension experts have volunteered their time and advice, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides support and funding through soil health programs.
The mission of NRCS is “helping people help the land.” That land usually refers to range land and farm acres, but the same programs and principles can apply to community gardens.
“We're trying to get people together to go back to some of the things that were important years ago to our people for self-sustainability,” said Mary Scott, a Rosebud Indian Reservation member and tribal liaison with NRCS.
Student gardner holding out herbs for the camera
The reservation’s growing environment presents some significant challenges. The garden site had been a conventional field, growing sunflowers, corn, soybeans and wheat. The heavy clay soils made it difficult to hold enough water for the garden, especially given the sloping hillside where it sits. Long, hot days would burn up the plants one day, and they next they’d be hit by torrential downpours, hail and wind.
“There are a lot of things outside of our control,” said Her Many Horses, “and that can be tough in such an extreme weather environment”
Rather than give up, however, the team has simply learned to adapt and make the most of what they have.
“We have to be really strategic about how we plan out our year to make the most of this short window,” Wilson said. “We have branched into utilizing some year-round growing structures to expand our season.”
The garden is tended with organic methods, using fish emulsion and compost for fertilizer. Local ranchers have donated hay bales – the more beaten-up and weather-worn the better. As ground cover, they help with weed control. Adding mulch or organic matter has helped break up the hard, clay soil and has been a huge asset for moisture retention as well.
We’re using a regenerative approach to agriculture,” said Her Many Horses. “We’re always trying to give back to our soil.
The garden also incorporates time-honored growing techniques of the tribal community. Produce is grown with the three sister’s method – beans, corn and squash grow in rows and benefit from one another.
“Beans help fertilize the soil by providing nitrogen,” Wilson explained. “The corn, when it grows up the stalk, the beans are able to wrap around the stalk, and the squash actually helps keep out pests and other weeds.”
7 workers talking in the garden
It’s one of many ways the garden is bringing the community back to its roots. It also brings youth and elders together, sharing a positive outlook while producing something for the whole community. It connects people with land and community, giving them knowledge to pass along wherever they go.
Sharing knowledge is a big part of the project, Scott said, because it’s how cultures and traditions are kept alive.
“Growing our own produce is very important, so that this community can become self-sustaining, not only as a people, but as a tribe,” she said.
The ultimate goal is to completely change the food system on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
“My vision is that our community becomes a food center where we have restaurants and food trucks sourcing their foods locally,” Wilson said, “and the garden is the first step to helping change our community mindset about food.”
But it goes even deeper than that.
“I hope that our community can be healthy and happy, that we can be sovereign,” said Her Many Horses. “And for us, that starts with everyone knowing where their food comes from.”
- Written by Janelle Atyeo
CAPTION: "Signs in the Lakota language identifying plants, enriching connection to traditional culture."
NRCS ARTICLE 4/2020: There’s a sense of pride that comes with doing something for yourself, and growing food is a major part of being self-sustaining, healthy and whole.
A one-acre community garden on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota is connecting tribal members with the land, with food, and with their past.
“It’s about food sovereignty. It’s about having the choice of where and how you get your food, knowing how to feed yourself,” said Matte Wilson. “If that grocery store wasn’t here, would you know how to feed yourself and your family?”
Born and raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wilson is now director of the recently re-branded Sicangu Community Development Corporation (CDC) Food Sovereignty Initiative. One of its major projects is the Keya Wakpala Garden. Since moving back home in 2018, food sovereignty has played a major part of Wilson’s life.
“It is something that really excites me, something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life,” he said.
Vegetable Harvest on table
The food sovereignty movement has gained significant momentum throughout the country in recent years and is largely being led by indigenous communities. According to Wilson, you don’t have to be indigenous to appreciate delicious, locally grown foods.
“Food has the power to bring people together – it’s always been an essential part of all of our social interactions, whether or not you are Lakota,” he said.
For Keya Wakpala garden manager Ed Her Many Horses, the garden and learning how to grow food has been nothing short of trans-formative.
“It’s impacted me in a lot of different ways,” he said. “It helped give me a reason to get up in the morning – it still does. There is so much to appreciate in the garden.”
But it’s more than food, he’s found. Caring for a garden fosters community. The Keya Wakpala Garden is a place where interns, volunteers, community members and children come together to work, and they take pride in the outcome.
“It’s a beacon of hope, I think,” Her Many Horses said.
The Boys and Girls Club brings kids to the garden where they can plant, pick vegetables and even harvest indigenous foods such as ceyaka, wild mint, in the nearby wetlands. They learn to identify foods as they’re grown and harvested, and follow up field work with cooking sessions. Starting with young kids, the project aims to make gardening and producing food something that’s second nature – something they’re able to pass on to future generations.
Learning by doing is key, according to Wilson.
“When they are able to see it in person and participate in the process, it is really powerful. It makes people appreciate food and agriculture more,” he said.
Garden Row signs in lakota
Foster Cournoyer-Hogan is a student at Stanford University from the Rosebud Indian Reservation who interned for the summer at the Keya Wakpala Garden. His additions to the garden plot included the signs that identified the plants with Lakota words. There was wagmu (squash), tinpsilazizi (carrots), phangi sasa (beets) and mastincatawote (lettuce).
Using the Lakota language is a way to stay connected to traditional culture. That’s especially important when children and elders visit the garden, he said.
Along with strengthening connections to culture and community, the garden is helping solve another issue on the reservation – addressing health challenges. Diabetes and diet related illness is high on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, but the produce from the garden gives people access to nourishing food.
“Our food is everything,” Cournoyer-Hogan said.
“Food is medicine,” added Wilson: “The way we treat our garden, the way we treat the land is how we treat ourselves … we take care of the land, and it takes care of us.”
The group has some expert resources when it comes to taking care of the land and the plants. Master Gardeners and university extension experts have volunteered their time and advice, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides support and funding through soil health programs.
The mission of NRCS is “helping people help the land.” That land usually refers to range land and farm acres, but the same programs and principles can apply to community gardens.
“We're trying to get people together to go back to some of the things that were important years ago to our people for self-sustainability,” said Mary Scott, a Rosebud Indian Reservation member and tribal liaison with NRCS.
Student gardner holding out herbs for the camera
The reservation’s growing environment presents some significant challenges. The garden site had been a conventional field, growing sunflowers, corn, soybeans and wheat. The heavy clay soils made it difficult to hold enough water for the garden, especially given the sloping hillside where it sits. Long, hot days would burn up the plants one day, and they next they’d be hit by torrential downpours, hail and wind.
“There are a lot of things outside of our control,” said Her Many Horses, “and that can be tough in such an extreme weather environment”
Rather than give up, however, the team has simply learned to adapt and make the most of what they have.
“We have to be really strategic about how we plan out our year to make the most of this short window,” Wilson said. “We have branched into utilizing some year-round growing structures to expand our season.”
The garden is tended with organic methods, using fish emulsion and compost for fertilizer. Local ranchers have donated hay bales – the more beaten-up and weather-worn the better. As ground cover, they help with weed control. Adding mulch or organic matter has helped break up the hard, clay soil and has been a huge asset for moisture retention as well.
We’re using a regenerative approach to agriculture,” said Her Many Horses. “We’re always trying to give back to our soil.
The garden also incorporates time-honored growing techniques of the tribal community. Produce is grown with the three sister’s method – beans, corn and squash grow in rows and benefit from one another.
“Beans help fertilize the soil by providing nitrogen,” Wilson explained. “The corn, when it grows up the stalk, the beans are able to wrap around the stalk, and the squash actually helps keep out pests and other weeds.”
7 workers talking in the garden
It’s one of many ways the garden is bringing the community back to its roots. It also brings youth and elders together, sharing a positive outlook while producing something for the whole community. It connects people with land and community, giving them knowledge to pass along wherever they go.
Sharing knowledge is a big part of the project, Scott said, because it’s how cultures and traditions are kept alive.
“Growing our own produce is very important, so that this community can become self-sustaining, not only as a people, but as a tribe,” she said.
The ultimate goal is to completely change the food system on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
“My vision is that our community becomes a food center where we have restaurants and food trucks sourcing their foods locally,” Wilson said, “and the garden is the first step to helping change our community mindset about food.”
But it goes even deeper than that.
“I hope that our community can be healthy and happy, that we can be sovereign,” said Her Many Horses. “And for us, that starts with everyone knowing where their food comes from.”
- Written by Janelle Atyeo
CAPTION: "Rather than give up, however, the team has simply learned to adapt and make the most of what they have."
NRCS ARTICLE 4/2020: There’s a sense of pride that comes with doing something for yourself, and growing food is a major part of being self-sustaining, healthy and whole.
A one-acre community garden on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota is connecting tribal members with the land, with food, and with their past.
“It’s about food sovereignty. It’s about having the choice of where and how you get your food, knowing how to feed yourself,” said Matte Wilson. “If that grocery store wasn’t here, would you know how to feed yourself and your family?”
Born and raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wilson is now director of the recently re-branded Sicangu Community Development Corporation (CDC) Food Sovereignty Initiative. One of its major projects is the Keya Wakpala Garden. Since moving back home in 2018, food sovereignty has played a major part of Wilson’s life.
“It is something that really excites me, something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life,” he said.
Vegetable Harvest on table
The food sovereignty movement has gained significant momentum throughout the country in recent years and is largely being led by indigenous communities. According to Wilson, you don’t have to be indigenous to appreciate delicious, locally grown foods.
“Food has the power to bring people together – it’s always been an essential part of all of our social interactions, whether or not you are Lakota,” he said.
For Keya Wakpala garden manager Ed Her Many Horses, the garden and learning how to grow food has been nothing short of trans-formative.
“It’s impacted me in a lot of different ways,” he said. “It helped give me a reason to get up in the morning – it still does. There is so much to appreciate in the garden.”
But it’s more than food, he’s found. Caring for a garden fosters community. The Keya Wakpala Garden is a place where interns, volunteers, community members and children come together to work, and they take pride in the outcome.
“It’s a beacon of hope, I think,” Her Many Horses said.
The Boys and Girls Club brings kids to the garden where they can plant, pick vegetables and even harvest indigenous foods such as ceyaka, wild mint, in the nearby wetlands. They learn to identify foods as they’re grown and harvested, and follow up field work with cooking sessions. Starting with young kids, the project aims to make gardening and producing food something that’s second nature – something they’re able to pass on to future generations.
Learning by doing is key, according to Wilson.
“When they are able to see it in person and participate in the process, it is really powerful. It makes people appreciate food and agriculture more,” he said.
Garden Row signs in lakota
Foster Cournoyer-Hogan is a student at Stanford University from the Rosebud Indian Reservation who interned for the summer at the Keya Wakpala Garden. His additions to the garden plot included the signs that identified the plants with Lakota words. There was wagmu (squash), tinpsilazizi (carrots), phangi sasa (beets) and mastincatawote (lettuce).
Using the Lakota language is a way to stay connected to traditional culture. That’s especially important when children and elders visit the garden, he said.
Along with strengthening connections to culture and community, the garden is helping solve another issue on the reservation – addressing health challenges. Diabetes and diet related illness is high on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, but the produce from the garden gives people access to nourishing food.
“Our food is everything,” Cournoyer-Hogan said.
“Food is medicine,” added Wilson: “The way we treat our garden, the way we treat the land is how we treat ourselves … we take care of the land, and it takes care of us.”
The group has some expert resources when it comes to taking care of the land and the plants. Master Gardeners and university extension experts have volunteered their time and advice, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides support and funding through soil health programs.
The mission of NRCS is “helping people help the land.” That land usually refers to range land and farm acres, but the same programs and principles can apply to community gardens.
“We're trying to get people together to go back to some of the things that were important years ago to our people for self-sustainability,” said Mary Scott, a Rosebud Indian Reservation member and tribal liaison with NRCS.
The reservation’s growing environment presents some significant challenges. The garden site had been a conventional field, growing sunflowers, corn, soybeans and wheat. The heavy clay soils made it difficult to hold enough water for the garden, especially given the sloping hillside where it sits. Long, hot days would burn up the plants one day, and they next they’d be hit by torrential downpours, hail and wind.
“There are a lot of things outside of our control,” said Her Many Horses, “and that can be tough in such an extreme weather environment”
Rather than give up, however, the team has simply learned to adapt and make the most of what they have.
“We have to be really strategic about how we plan out our year to make the most of this short window,” Wilson said. “We have branched into utilizing some year-round growing structures to expand our season.”
The garden is tended with organic methods, using fish emulsion and compost for fertilizer. Local ranchers have donated hay bales – the more beaten-up and weather-worn the better. As ground cover, they help with weed control. Adding mulch or organic matter has helped break up the hard, clay soil and has been a huge asset for moisture retention as well.
We’re using a regenerative approach to agriculture,” said Her Many Horses. “We’re always trying to give back to our soil.
The garden also incorporates time-honored growing techniques of the tribal community. Produce is grown with the three sister’s method – beans, corn and squash grow in rows and benefit from one another.
“Beans help fertilize the soil by providing nitrogen,” Wilson explained. “The corn, when it grows up the stalk, the beans are able to wrap around the stalk, and the squash actually helps keep out pests and other weeds.”
7 workers talking in the garden
It’s one of many ways the garden is bringing the community back to its roots. It also brings youth and elders together, sharing a positive outlook while producing something for the whole community. It connects people with land and community, giving them knowledge to pass along wherever they go.
Sharing knowledge is a big part of the project, Scott said, because it’s how cultures and traditions are kept alive.
“Growing our own produce is very important, so that this community can become self-sustaining, not only as a people, but as a tribe,” she said.
The ultimate goal is to completely change the food system on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
“My vision is that our community becomes a food center where we have restaurants and food trucks sourcing their foods locally,” Wilson said, “and the garden is the first step to helping change our community mindset about food.”
But it goes even deeper than that.
“I hope that our community can be healthy and happy, that we can be sovereign,” said Her Many Horses. “And for us, that starts with everyone knowing where their food comes from.”
- Written by Janelle Atyeo
CAPTION: “When they are able to see it in person and participate in the process, it is really powerful. It makes people appreciate food and agriculture more.”
NRCS ARTICLE 4/2020: There’s a sense of pride that comes with doing something for yourself, and growing food is a major part of being self-sustaining, healthy and whole.
A one-acre community garden on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota is connecting tribal members with the land, with food, and with their past.
“It’s about food sovereignty. It’s about having the choice of where and how you get your food, knowing how to feed yourself,” said Matte Wilson. “If that grocery store wasn’t here, would you know how to feed yourself and your family?”
Born and raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wilson is now director of the recently re-branded Sicangu Community Development Corporation (CDC) Food Sovereignty Initiative. One of its major projects is the Keya Wakpala Garden. Since moving back home in 2018, food sovereignty has played a major part of Wilson’s life.
“It is something that really excites me, something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life,” he said.
The food sovereignty movement has gained significant momentum throughout the country in recent years and is largely being led by indigenous communities. According to Wilson, you don’t have to be indigenous to appreciate delicious, locally grown foods.
“Food has the power to bring people together – it’s always been an essential part of all of our social interactions, whether or not you are Lakota,” he said.
For Keya Wakpala garden manager Ed Her Many Horses, the garden and learning how to grow food has been nothing short of trans-formative.
“It’s impacted me in a lot of different ways,” he said. “It helped give me a reason to get up in the morning – it still does. There is so much to appreciate in the garden.”
But it’s more than food, he’s found. Caring for a garden fosters community. The Keya Wakpala Garden is a place where interns, volunteers, community members and children come together to work, and they take pride in the outcome.
“It’s a beacon of hope, I think,” Her Many Horses said.
The Boys and Girls Club brings kids to the garden where they can plant, pick vegetables and even harvest indigenous foods such as ceyaka, wild mint, in the nearby wetlands. They learn to identify foods as they’re grown and harvested, and follow up field work with cooking sessions. Starting with young kids, the project aims to make gardening and producing food something that’s second nature – something they’re able to pass on to future generations.
Learning by doing is key, according to Wilson.
“When they are able to see it in person and participate in the process, it is really powerful. It makes people appreciate food and agriculture more,” he said.
Foster Cournoyer-Hogan is a student at Stanford University from the Rosebud Indian Reservation who interned for the summer at the Keya Wakpala Garden. His additions to the garden plot included the signs that identified the plants with Lakota words. There was wagmu (squash), tinpsilazizi (carrots), phangi sasa (beets) and mastincatawote (lettuce).
Using the Lakota language is a way to stay connected to traditional culture. That’s especially important when children and elders visit the garden, he said.
Along with strengthening connections to culture and community, the garden is helping solve another issue on the reservation – addressing health challenges. Diabetes and diet related illness is high on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, but the produce from the garden gives people access to nourishing food.
“Our food is everything,” Cournoyer-Hogan said.
“Food is medicine,” added Wilson: “The way we treat our garden, the way we treat the land is how we treat ourselves … we take care of the land, and it takes care of us.”
The group has some expert resources when it comes to taking care of the land and the plants. Master Gardeners and university extension experts have volunteered their time and advice, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides support and funding through soil health programs.
The mission of NRCS is “helping people help the land.” That land usually refers to range land and farm acres, but the same programs and principles can apply to community gardens.
“We're trying to get people together to go back to some of the things that were important years ago to our people for self-sustainability,” said Mary Scott, a Rosebud Indian Reservation member and tribal liaison with NRCS.
The reservation’s growing environment presents some significant challenges. The garden site had been a conventional field, growing sunflowers, corn, soybeans and wheat. The heavy clay soils made it difficult to hold enough water for the garden, especially given the sloping hillside where it sits. Long, hot days would burn up the plants one day, and they next they’d be hit by torrential downpours, hail and wind.
“There are a lot of things outside of our control,” said Her Many Horses, “and that can be tough in such an extreme weather environment”
Rather than give up, however, the team has simply learned to adapt and make the most of what they have.
“We have to be really strategic about how we plan out our year to make the most of this short window,” Wilson said. “We have branched into utilizing some year-round growing structures to expand our season.”
The garden is tended with organic methods, using fish emulsion and compost for fertilizer. Local ranchers have donated hay bales – the more beaten-up and weather-worn the better. As ground cover, they help with weed control. Adding mulch or organic matter has helped break up the hard, clay soil and has been a huge asset for moisture retention as well.
We’re using a regenerative approach to agriculture,” said Her Many Horses. “We’re always trying to give back to our soil.
The garden also incorporates time-honored growing techniques of the tribal community. Produce is grown with the three sister’s method – beans, corn and squash grow in rows and benefit from one another.
“Beans help fertilize the soil by providing nitrogen,” Wilson explained. “The corn, when it grows up the stalk, the beans are able to wrap around the stalk, and the squash actually helps keep out pests and other weeds.”
7 workers talking in the garden
It’s one of many ways the garden is bringing the community back to its roots. It also brings youth and elders together, sharing a positive outlook while producing something for the whole community. It connects people with land and community, giving them knowledge to pass along wherever they go.
Sharing knowledge is a big part of the project, Scott said, because it’s how cultures and traditions are kept alive.
“Growing our own produce is very important, so that this community can become self-sustaining, not only as a people, but as a tribe,” she said.
The ultimate goal is to completely change the food system on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
“My vision is that our community becomes a food center where we have restaurants and food trucks sourcing their foods locally,” Wilson said, “and the garden is the first step to helping change our community mindset about food.”
But it goes even deeper than that.
“I hope that our community can be healthy and happy, that we can be sovereign,” said Her Many Horses. “And for us, that starts with everyone knowing where their food comes from.”
All the safety in the world can't accomodate for developing a human sense of danger. There were some quite steep passages on this boulder, but easily managed if you apply the right attitude. It's amazing how quickly kids learn how to do this.
And let me shout this, mothers of the world: They learn it by DOING IT, not by NOT DOING IT!