Troppo, not sure where it started life around 1984 but before it was painted in big bird colours in 2000 it was with the Zimbabwe Air Force. The previous Greek owner (A340 Captain) ferried it up (along with another one from Africa later) with a view to running a small airline from the mainland to the Greek Islands.
Unfortunately he did only one flight and then Sept 11 occured and the Greek authorities regulated him out of business and the two Tris have sat in Sparta ever since. My boss is already talking about going back later in the year to collect the other one as apparently a guy in Fiji wants to lease one.
Bolt - yes that is a rear view mirrow and part of our regular CLEAROFF checks was to have a quick glance back to make sure she wasn't on fire or the cowls weren't being shaken off. There is a rear engine fire warning light on the panel and also a switch which you activate pre take off which activates a flashing light to tell you it's armed. If you do have a rear engine failure on take off it will stay on telling you the rear donk has stopped. Believe it or not without that light it's quite difficult to recognise that the engine is not operating which I so ably proved while taxying away from parking in Darwin. I started all engines normally, called for taxi, and moved off thinking I was using way more power than usual to get moving and then turning. It took the other pilot pointing to the rear engine tacho reading zero (which we both initially thought was faulty) and then confirmation using the rear view that the engine had stopped.
The other big problem with these aircraft is prop sync which is a complete bugger to get absolutely right. Only through a couple of days of trial and error did we get them close to sync'ed and even then after 8-10 hours flying I still had blurry vision because of the harmonic the engines were blasting through my muscular skeletel system!
