PRAT+(Photo+Reconnaissance+Aircraft+Trainer)

The PRAT was bought at a sale at the HMAC (now DMAC) many years ago (1995 I think). It was our second aircraft after the Yamamoto.

It has served well and is still flying today. It is isused extensively for photography using initially 35mm still single shot cameras, then 35mm motorised camera and even digital video cameras (Mustek solid state). It has also be used as a test bed for running in other engines.

In flight images

Images of the Broken Bank flying field

**Some of the In-flight video's:-**
[|Pratt_inflight_March2003_land.avi] [|Pratt_inflight_March2003_takeoff.avi] [|PRAT_Dee_hightide_2.avi] [|PRAT_Dee_hightide_3.avi]

In the early years, my Dad had a habbit of crashing quite a bit (who hasn't). The editied video is one such crash, repair and fly again. It dosn't matter to my Dad how bad it is....it WILL fly again. [|PRAT_crash_repair_flyagain_1.wmv]



Extract from the HAwk, December 2001. Hmmm.... A very large, 3-bladed propeller wearing a rather small aeroplane! Dave Thomson has been using his PRAT to run in the engine that is destined to haul his superb scale Westland Lysander around the sky. Up to now, he’s been using a two-bladed propeller... but he wanted to see how the engine performs when it’s driving the Lizzie’s 3-blader, so he fitted that to the PRAT too. Now the Lysander has a great big radial cowl at the front, so Dave had chosen a prop of fine pitch but high diameter so that as much as possible of the prop extended beyond the cowl. It looked OK on the Lysander, with its long undercarriage - but on the poor little PRAT it only just cleared the ground. Takeoff was accomplished without problem - but the prop caught the ground on landing and the shock-loading re-arranged the PRAT’s firewall a little. Easily repairable though.



Extract from the Hawk, April 2004. After a considerable amount of experimentation at home Dave Thomson has finally persuaded his spark-ignition Merco 60 to run on a two-stroke petrol-oil mix. The conversion to spark-ignition was begun by Geof Makin (the original owner of the engine) but it has taken a fair amount of tweaking to get it to run properly. Unfortunately the ingnition system seems to generate a fair amount of interference at present, so Dave will have to look at further suppression measures before he can fly the model (his venerable PRAT testbed) under petrol power.

Image below was taken on the way out to the field back in March 2000