Re the swastika on the tails of German aircraft, I was at an air display at Aschaffenburg in the early 80s when A Ju-52 (Doug Arnold’s ?) arrived with the “hakenkreutz” on the tail. It was noticeable that a discreet amount of heel-clicking and stiffening of the right arm went on.

As an aside, I understand that ‘Allo ‘Allo is now shown in Germany and incredibly popular to boot – there’s stiff right arms and heel clicking aplenty therein.

If you edited all that out each episode would be about 3 minutes long – all Madame Edith singing and Yvette flashing her lovelies.

Maybe they are relaxing the media rules in certain cases.

Oh, and I really like that Lufwaffe fella’s woolly mitts.

Darn, thought it was going to be a Stirling

I wish Aer Lingus would launch LPL-DUB – again.

Until they do I have one choice – Dan Dare, Wing & a prayer, Ryanair

Bored at work so here goes… you’re probably looking for a technical answer, which this isn’t, but I think it’s worth highlighting that perhaps a warplane is worth more than the sum of it’s capabilities… from an economic, scientific and geo-political point of view…

1. Building/flying/maintaining/upgrading it will keep many people in jobs for decades… these people will go out and spend their money on ebay and drag us out of this recession.

2. Thankfully, the majority of warplanes built are a huge waste of money if viewed purely in terms of how many operational sorties they get to perform. I’m glad the Vulcans, B-52s and Bears never got to fulfil the missions for which they were designed (iron bomb delivery excluded) but I’m glad they were there just in case… the Vulcans and B-52s anyway.

3. The F-22 is hugely expensive but I’m glad the free world is maintaining the resources to design deterrents like this – otherwise those same scientists would probably be designing the spiffy cars that the bad guys would be driving around after they’d walked into our countries.

4. Missions change all the time – if the end of the cold war taught us anything it should be ‘expect the unexpected’

I guess it’s the corny old cliche ‘I’d rather have a superlative Air Supremacy fighter and not need it than not have one and then find out I did need it after all’. Like the UK and fixed wing aircraft carriers…

meanwhile… in sunny Ireland… the TV news here doesn’t find the escalating conflict titilating enough so they decided to spice it up with some X-Files style intrigue last night…

while showing a picture of a USAF C-17 at Tbilisi airport last night they stated ‘Georgian Troops arrive back from Iraq in an unmarked C-130 Hercules’

…doubtless designed to infer some nefarious, tinkering, backdoor shenanigans by the White House. The combatants needn’t worry – the press here is already blaming someone else.

That’s good then, it was obviously worth the lives of the one million seven hundred thousand Commonwealth Servicemen and women who died during the Great War wasn’t it?

Regards,

kev35

They didn’t die specifically so people could have a day off but they did die so that future generations would have the freedom to spend time with their families in peace (amongst many other things). I don’t see that an extra bank holiday is an inappropriate way to mark their sacrifice (even if the majority of those on the receiving end of said holiday don’t give it a second thought).

I think and hope that the fallen would be happy enough that they’d ‘won’ their descendents a chance to spend more time together – God knows that time is limited enough in this work/money obssessed society – and if their sacrifice brings a tiny extra bit of quality time into our lives or a gives another good excuse for a veterans get-together why not embrace it rather than poo-pooing the idea?

The two minutes silence is a highly appropriate, moving and sombre ceremony but from reading books, about RAF aircrew for instance, it was clear that they lived their lives to the full in between missions – I’m sure they’d be all in favour of a sortie to Alton Towers!

Another one to avoid – HMS Belfast – most of their dummies have the same strange, ill-fitting ginger hairpiece and an alarming glare – and there’s a stuffed cat in a miniature hammock.