Since yesterday January 6 2023, EBSG airfield has the honor to hangar a Lockheed L18 Lodestar with quite an impressive history if you ask me.

This is the airplane that, on June 17, 1987, broke the Howard Hughes world tour record of June 1938. At that time, Howard Hughes flew around earth in just over 91 hours.

It all began in 1987 when Patrick Fourticq, a pilot at Air France, stated to be willing to challenge the Howard Hughes record, and breaking records did not scare him.

After all the preparation work, the team composed of Patrick Fourticq, Henri Pescarolo, Hubert Auriol, and Arthur Powell took off from Le Bourget Paris Airshow on June 17, 1987. They came back after 88 hours and 49 minutes.

The world tour record on a piston airplane of Howard Hughes (91 hours) was broken and as far as we know, the team and the aircraft are still the owners of this world record !!

After this record, the aircraft was stored in Creil (Oise, France) and purchased by the Sabena Old Timers, it was transferred to Zaventem by road on May 20, 1998.

After having worked on it for years, the job being ampler than expected, the plane was bought by a private owner in 2016 and transported by an exceptional convoy to EBSG on January 5 and 6, 2023.

It arrived around 5:00 a.m. and was off-loaded around 7:00 a.m. with two other convoys carrying wings, engines, etc.

Stay tuned because that aircraft type has also a brilliant history with Sabena. 

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