Right, I’ve been to see them in the flesh now.

For me something about the Harrier didn’t work. I’m sure there was a lot of work involved dangling it from the skylight but I doubt that was appreciated by the average viewer. The feathers painted on it are very faint so it just looks grubby and the painted-on beak just looks too much like the radome of the Sea Harrier (which is after all what it is). Symbolic maybe but it just doesn’t look like a dead bird.

The jaguar on the other hand is really interesting; it looks great from any angle and it didn’t bother me a jot that it was upside-down and that also gave it a discarded child’s toy feel about the whole thing. The only slightly disappointing thing was that close-up there were lots of ‘plastic’ bits that had been stripped of paint (or not removed) and those kind of spoilt the overall ‘hewn out of shiny metal’ feel of the whole.

I too wonder if the Jaguar is suspended. Seems a lot of weight to rest on canopy and tail.

In answer to these points, no, the Jaguar isn’t suspended and yes, it is a lot of weight to rest on the canopy. There is actually a scaffold frame built inside the cockpit (no seat) that is fixed, rather crudely, to the inside of the canopy with huge amounts of fibreglass matting; it’s rather a mess actually and you wouldn’t have been able to see it if the whole canopy had been painted over.