Also realise that half are smarter than that, and since you have no idea on which side of the dividing line the signatories are situated, the remark is utterly pointless.

I’m guessing you signed then!

I imagined that by posting “there must be something Talismanic about a man squeezing a 42 inch waist into 36 inch jeans” most people would know I was being ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek. Those on the smarter half of the curve at least. So where are you? 😎

What a shame, it survived until relatively recently. Mind you, there wasn’t a lot of love for the classic propliners in the 70s.

That statement makes me wonder. What airframes are we taking for granted now that will be cherished in the not-too-distant future?

It is interesting to see how people are spinning this story. In a lot of commentators’ heads, Clarkson carried out something of a symbolic act in duffing up a (supposedly) weak, effeminate BBC producer. It is almost as though he attacked the institution itself for being too liberal and too readily emasculated. I’m surprised that everybody is treating a bit of bog-standard workplace violence as a Rorschach test, whereby Clarkson is the self appointed last outpost of non-PC red blooded masculinity swimming against a tide of hand-wringing, overly earnest and easily offended beta males. Heady stuff. There must be something Talismanic about a man squeezing a 42 inch waste into 36 inch jeans….

Given that we are recapitulating earlier posts, I have two points to make.

1) If I smacked somebody in my office, over something as trivial as my dinner options, I would be hung out to dry. It sounds like Clarkson behaved worryingly like a spoilt child.

2) 800k + signatures means very little. As George Carlin said: Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

“I’m glad I wasn’t hallucinating”.

Maybe not then but, what about now ?

Sometimes I see your posts and think I’m having a flashback to the ’50s. Does that count?

Meddle – your comments serve only to reveal your immaturity. So are perhaps understandable.

No need to be such a Charlie Hunt about it. :eagerness:

Rather like that other odious bore, John Green, you appear to try and claim an intellectual superiority by any means necessary once you have run out of anything useful to say. Are you the same person? Now you’ve resorted to personal attacks. I’m immature, I take it, because I don’t subscribe to the notion that ‘blacks’ happily sat through hours of the Minstrel show and that the only people offended by such a show are Guardian-reading, terminally white uni student types who get a kick out of being offended all the time? I fail to see why I have to be cautious ‘not to ascribe todays values to yesterdays standards’ when others can claim that ‘blacks’ hadn’t yet thought to be offended by a ridiculous portrayal at a time when they were heavily discriminated against. Such blatant stupidity needs to be called out every time!

Surely putting a prop on it, you’d have to take the original off, which was torqued on many many years ago? Then you lose originality.
That old paint is just that. That old metal is just that. Do you preserve every can of pop you ever drink because once it may have been part of an aircraft? There are still aircraft wrecks littering PNG, and many other parts of the world. Perhaps we should just throw this one back in the water, as that paint will be bleaching out in the American atmosphere…

A somewhat hysterical post. There is a world of difference between replacing a prop and building a new BF 109 and ‘skinning’ it with the remains of this one (having refinished and filled the remaining metalwork). This airframe would benefit from being stored indoors with some proper climate control, in my my opinion. I fail to see the frankly illogical conclusiong being reached in a couple of posts here, that either this 109 is restored to flying condition else it will rot away to nothing.

My turn at making a hysterical post:

The loss of the Biggin A-26 is pertinent as a moment of pilot error (or possibly mechanical failure in the cockpit) cost us a historic aircraft. The same could happen to this aircraft, and then the world would be short of one BF 109, purely because some old boy with a clean flying record misjudged his altitude before attempting a roll, or because he pegs out in the cockpit (as might have happened to that P51 pilot at Reno), or because something becomes unfastened and chucks it into a spin (cue handwringing). All of this to keep a small, anti-social clique of Rain Man types with telephoto lenses and step ladders from getting upset because the noisy, darting Messerschmitt overhead is really a Buchon? Come on!

Millions of people watch Downton Abbey. My father must be one of the tiny minority that gets actively upset when BR Standard Mk1 coaches show up, purely because they aren’t period correct.

I also disagree with the notion that younger enthusiasts will come along and ensure that ‘these things’ continue. Where are these younger enthusiasts? Certainly not on here! To stay on the subject of age, the relatively advanced age of the pilots involved would appear to be a common theme with the loss of historic aircraft. The Soplata Corsair was flown by a 66 year old man when it crashed. Jimmy Leeward was 74 when he crashed that P51 thing at Reno. Charlie Schwenker was 64 when he crashed that Stearman at Dayton. We are dealing with a hobby that is predominantly practiced by, and funded by, elderly men who are not being readily replaced by younger talent, sadly. Or is it only the older pilots crashing? I don’t see any younger talent on Warbird Information Exchange either, for the record.

Lets pretend that there is an eager workforce of young aviation enthusiasts who somehow picked up the skills to restore aircraft of this vintage. Who pays for all this? Will they eagerly fund the recovery of other sunken wrecks? Where will the money for new, difficult, airframe recovery come from? Are people on here considering returning this 109 to the air as a viable option because, for all we know, six more 109s sit within easy recovery depth in lakes somewhere and can serve as our ‘buffer crop’ if this one happens to go in? Further more, the notion that we should just take the risk and restore this 109 to flyable condition because hangars can collapse on grounded aircraft, sometimes, is beyond idiotic. KB976 got muched in a hangar collapse at Woodford… so… restore this 109 to flying condition! :stupid:

What ARE you on about……??

Behaviour I see all the time on the Internet. You firstly suggested that it is possible that black people were never offended by minstrel shows, Love Thy Neighbour, and that a jew (race being important here, apparently) in black face did wonders for race relations in the ’30s. Now either you are being willfully ignorant or you are attempting to downplay the systematic racism clearly evident in Britain in the ’70s and before. Not really worth discussing on its own, but you then pull out the asinine ‘We can have a different discussion about racial tensions and their roots, but that has been rehearsed here many times’. You are quite happy to escalate a discussion with some bold (and stupid) claims, but then moan about the thread being off topic.

I had to laugh at your comment “you haven’t really convinced me that at the time there was any negative reaction from blacks to the Black and White Minstrel Show”. Moronic.