Hello To All
Here is my entry:
THE GOON SHEEP TOURS
The Curious case of a tourist aviation company with a never-ending waiting list
Goon Sheep Tours was, at first sight, a rather common provider of chartered aviation tours; it advertise as providing, with its fleet of vintage aircraft, both nostalgic trips and, for the most risk-takers, sky diving and tours even near active conflict areas.
The fleet consisted of 4 Junkers Ju-52m3 and a few Douglas DC-3s.
The company was so successful that a seemingly never ending waiting list existed; however, people started ventilating online that it was impossible to book a tour: whenever anyone would try to do i, he/she was meet with a timetable full of red marked days.
The tours were real because it had a near perfect online score of 4.9 stars; the accompanying reviews were full of praise; those had a more or less common pattern and texts but surely they could not all be fake, right?
In fact, if anyone managed to book a seat on one of those tours he/she would not be able to even find seat inside the aircraft: the aircraft was full of technical consoles, managed by an equal number of flight crew and the space not occupied by that, had all sort of equipment, like sensors, antennas and even weapons.
All those little secrets were kept inside and would only pop-up when required: the true was that Goon Sheep Tours was a cover company for a military mercenary company, a gun-for-hire flying company.
When a new deal was reached, the company would set up a new office in that country and began its flying operations; advertisement were made and promise both the nostalgic leisure tour aboard a vintage aircraft or, for the more risk fans, sky diving or even night flying.
The aircraft would then be operated under that guise, but following the new client’s specific directives; these typically entailed flying a sortie (with the aircraft full of “customers”) near the front-line and, when away from spying eyes, deploy all its array of sensors and weapons and then conduct its business: striking enemy’s positions, both in gunship style or with guided weapons, both bombs guided by GPS of even air to ground missiles; all neatly stored inside and deployed via a belly mounted weapons bay.
The aircraft was protected from afar by aircraft and ground-base equipment of the client’s armed forces but it was not defenseless on its own: it had a complete ECM suite of equipment, Chaff and Flare equipment and, even if it was approached by curious enemy’s aircraft, it had a little surprise for them, inside those curious wing-tip mounted boxes: air-to-air missiles destined for the snooping aircraft.
When in need of extra speed to get in or, specially, to get out, the aircraft could also deploy a belly mounted jet-engine for that extra push home; this was helped also by the installed engines of the aircraft: those bore only an external resemblance to the originals, and had a many times greater output.
The innocent external look of the aircraft can be seen in the inset image; who could imaged that such lovely vintage, piece of museum, aircraft could provide another kind of “fun” from above. It would be years before anyone also realized the pun on its name Goon Sheep and the ominous meaning of its logo.
