If only you could get the foxes to eat rabbit.

You’d save a fortune in ammo bills.

Good thread. This isn’t the best poetry but it makes its point very well to me.

The Airman Demobbed

I rode the storm and the lightning
And raced the gay clouds I flew,
Dipped under the arch of the rainbow,
And swung like a star in the blue.

I slid down the path of the sunbeams,
And swooped like a gull to the wave,
I dropped o’er the crest of the mountains,
Down the streams that the valleys gave.

Now my feet are leaden and earthbound
And I know why the caged bird dies,
For my soul looks out to the blue ways,
When I dare to look up to the sky.

Cuthbert Hicks

The converse of that is the discovery of Flight. It’s not poetry but I’m reminded of this quote from JTC Moore-Brabazon in 1910:

“Don’t know too much til you have got up in the air. After this you will feel inclined to take your hat off to every sparrow you see performing feats we can never even hope to imitate”

In case it takes Pondskater a while to dig out his photos

Seriously – could take months 😉

here are some taken at Doncaster in 1976. Pity that tower/prewar terminal was not preserved.

Great pics – thanks. I was there just after the tower had gone but the story IIRC was that it was disused and had begun being used by local youths for late night parties. It got vandalised and on one occasion set on fire – after which it was demolished. Classic case of a building without a use not surviving.

I love the low-vis approach past the Punch Hotel. The Aero Club aircraft always had to approach from the opposite side, from the north, to stay clear of the Finningley MATZ. Shame, I used to live near the hotel and wanted a photo of the house. It’d have only ended up in a box in the attic though 🙂

Allan

The Sealand is an interesting, if flawed, little plane. It seems it was hindered by its hydrodynamics. First they found it couldn’t be used safely in the open sea – which cost an order from British West Indian Airways, and then its handling limited use in narrow waterways until a modification was added to the hull.

In theory it shouldn’t have happened, not with the Short Brother’s previous experience in sucessful flying boats but the company had changed a lot during the war.

Anyway, the Sealand is a really pretty little plane so here’s a couple of pics of the prototype G-AIVX.

[*]Short Sperrin. Who was responsible for designing that!

C.P.T. Lipscomb.

Yep, that old LPT cable thing should work.

If the USB port is working and you have a USB memory stick/flash drive, you could put that in. You would need to be running Windows XP or at the very least Windows 98 2nd Attempt but with 98 you would need a software driver for the memory stick/flash drive thing which is probably going to create more trouble if you haven’t got a drive to load it in from.

Or – a bit off the wall – but can you get a modem to connect to it and e-mail the files to yourself?

Allan

Hi Garry,

That’s an interesting project – good luck with it. It looks like you are doing most of the right things already.

I’ve just completed a research project that similarly had no easy to access records. The way I found around it was through oral history – find the people who were there and record their story (ideally with a digital recorder or at least some good note taking) The downside is that for this period of history, it really is last chance for oral history.

An alternative is to chase around with the likes of the Imperial War Museum oral history archive and see what is already there. Sunderlandnut has already found one good one.

The poor records for 231 may be down to the person who filled in the forms. Some units recorded much more detail than others. 4 (C) OTU is one of the worst I’ve seen – and one I would have really liked good information from!

Do you have any idea of where the Scottish Aviation archive is held? Presumably it was merged into the BAE archives when the companies were merged?

Allan

Hi,

The Hunter certainly wasn’t the only aircraft to go through Tower Bridge. The first was Frank McClean in August 1912. He took a Short S27 on a trip up the Thames to draw attention to advances in British aircraft – apparently “flying under various bridges en route” 😮 eventually landing outside Parliament.