Flight and Aeroplane ran some pretty detailled articles on the race just before it started – next time I am in my loft I’ll have a look-see, but I do not hold out high hopes to get anything like the ‘right’ colours for modelling!

She was not on the deck Friday

Last I heard she’d suffered some nose damage – and the Intrepid Museum was running out of finance. Like everything though, it’s hard to get to the truth when you try and go through lots of PR people and Directors who like to ‘spin’.

Remarkably I only went past there yesterday making a delivery to AirTrans at EMA. I stopped on the bridge and took an up-to-date pic of the plaques.

RIP

The ‘0’ seems to match in with what would be the 4 degree 50 minute line, but that’s a odd graduation to use on a map. I’m not sure. Anyone got any other ideas?

I’ve doubled checked – it’s likely to be ’50’ – some maps show every 10 minutes of arc. The ’40’ would be off the fragment on the right.

The near vertical thin line is almost certainly a longitude line. The thick red line appears to be a road, and the thin horizontal blue lines is how maps were shaded to denote water. The bluey-grey line that is struck through with a short same colour line could well be a railway line (that’s a regular way of showing them) and the thinner, curving almost brown lines could well be contour or ‘height’ lines.

On a long shot, I googled Greenock in Scotland…

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&hl=en&q=greenock+map&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&resnum=1&ct=title

the coastline and features appear to match!

I think it shows the coast from Greenock around to Gourock, with the A770 and A78, with the railway lines you can just make out on the google map!

English Electric Lightning Volume 3 by Stewart Scott. Working on the book layout!

They are ‘Disney’ rocket bombs and were originally developed by the Royal Navy for use in penetration and destruction of U-boat and E-boat shelters. Weighing 4500 Ib, the Disney bomb was to free-fall after release until the rocket motor ignited at 5,000 feet, propelling the missile to a speed of 2400 feet per second at impact. In tests, a penetration of 20 feet was recorded before detonation.

As the bomb was 14 feet long there was no suitable British aircraft to deliver them. The USAAF was approached for help and in the autumn of 1944, trials were conducted by Operational Engineering from Bovingdon using a B-17G carrying a pair of Disney bombs on the little-used, external hard point wing racks. To prevent oscillation of the bombs on their racks it was necessary to for the pilot to make only gentle manoeuvres – the weight also meant that the aircraft was well above it’s usual bomb-load carried, so a trade-off hand to be made – thus less fuel could be uplifted, so that put the B-17 down on range. Disney Bombs were first used operationally by 92nd Group on 14 March 1945 and in later missions by 305th and 306th Groups as well.

They feature in a number of editions in our Airfield Focus series and in the hardback John Burn One Zero Five which we published a few years ago (copies still available on remainder to forum readers!) 😉