A Glimpse of Aeropark Budapest

My wife and I were in Hungary recently. I caught a glimpse of some old airplanes just outside the Budapest airport and snapped a few photos through the bus window.

The Aeropark hosts 13 airplanes, 3 helicopters, and a host of ground equipment, radars and so forth.

LI-2

The propeller plane above is a Lisunov Li-2, a license-built version of the well-known Douglas DC-3. More than 6,000 of these planes were built and used by Communist countries around the world.

I believe the helicopter on the right is a Mil Mi-2 helicopter. This particular aircraft was an air ambulance. Mi-2 helicopters are still in use today, in civilian and in miliary use – for example in Ukraine.

YAK-40

I believe the blue and white aircraft above is a Yakovlev YAK-40 (tail HA-LRA), decorated in the colours of defunct Hungarian airline Linair. Just over a thousand YAK-40 regional jets were built from 1967 to 1981, and they were widely exported behind the Iron Curtain and beyond.

I don’t know what the red plane is – perhaps another YAK-40?

Tu-134

The plane on the left is a Tupolev Tu-134, a very widely used aircraft in the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries.

The four-engine aircraft on the right is an Ilyushin Il-18V. I had the dubious pleasure of riding in an Il-18 in 1979 to Batumi, Georgia. It was very loud.

I would have loved to visit this aeropark; unfortunately there was no time and we never returned to the airport.