None of this is very good for the Shackleton! Very infrequent updates, and reports of website sabotage!?

You brought this on yourself when you labled critics as ‘keyboard warriors and armchair experts’, and yet you’re doing the same again.

I find it laughable that you perceive any post in this thread as ‘aggressive’. You’ve not found anything at all yet that relates to the Hercules story, but you keep stringing us along with all of this ‘stay tuned’ malarkey. So far you’ve found a random shipwreck that has nothing to do with the Hercules story. Even TIGHAR managed to find some random monkey bones and a perfume bottle. You have some catching up to do.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, absolute respect for that… …as well as the the usual keyboard warriors and armchair experts.

Right, so which is it? This is just passive aggressive nonsense from a self publicist who can’t keep an entire forum of people on side. I’m not going to become any more interested in this missing Hercules saga because you proffer respect in one sentence and then insults in the next. Simple as that. I’m not a keyboard warrior, I simply don’t like being co-opted into attempts to turn a secretive (yet fairly dull) tale of aviation woe into some tedius drawn-out pot boiler. Don’t tell me to tune in to the radio; tell us in this thread exactly what you’ve uncovered.

As for finding a shipwreck in the English Channel, are you honestly that surprised? I’ve dealt with shipwreck data before today, including stuff from the UK Hydrographic Office, and a lot of it is fairly approximate. A survey would tighten up a lot of this data, and there are wrecks to be discovered all around the coastline of the UK.

I also detest the phrase ‘mark-one eyeball’. Just putting that out there!

The Queen! Or, rather, G-XXEB carrying her.

The new piece looks too clunky and crude to have come from an aircraft, but I’m no expert. It looks a bit like lead, which would explain the surprising weight for the size of the item, but again I’m no expert. Can you pass an electric current through it?

Avion ancien‘s incident with the Bulldog (!) is an interesting one. The question of ‘why?’ maybe needs to be asked a bit more frequently. I don’t really understand what drives the guys to hang around the fence at Edinburgh airport all day long, and who then upload photos of 737s and Dash 8s onto Facebook. As far as I’m concerned, they took the exact same photographs yesterday, and every day last week. Some of the larger aviation photography aggregation websites have fairly stringent upload rules, as well as a leaderboard of uploaders. I reckon some people simply want the sort of praise from peers that comes from getting a ‘perfect’ shot, or at least capturing something rare and interesting skulking at the back of a hangar somewhere. Having many of your photos approved by these websites must feel pretty good.

The rarer stuff on private strips maybe makes a bit more sense; in the same way that a twitcher might travel miles to photograph the one rare bird blown off its migration route. For example, I learned that the Reid and Sigrist Desford had been restored because photos were taken of it at Spanhoe (looking mighty fine!) and posted up on Facebook. This was long before it was pictured on any of the forums, and before any official reveal. Did the owner know about this?

I do have to wonder though, do the bulk of these photographs ever get looked at again?

Having a nosy around on hawkertempest.se, and I’m wondering if there is still Tempest relics sitting in the weeds in Poona, India, as there were in 1980 as photographed on the site. It looks like there was a relatively clean, but unidentified example, whose fate is unkown.

http://www.hawkertempest.se/index.php/survivors/2015-01-19-19-22-20/mkiisatpoona

Our radio jumps between Classic FM, Planet Rock, LBC and BBC Radio 1Xtra. This is governed usually by how quickly we want to get something done in the kitchen!

But the next update on R4 is going to be controversial, of that I am confident…

In what sense? Meyer never existed? A white Fiat Uno brought down the Hercules? Meyer was actually Glenn Miller, and he made it to France on both occasions? Sorry, but this is a cheap device used by every Podcast presenter under the sun, usually to keep the pennies and freebies pouring in. Are you contractually obliged not to tell us what this exciting update is, or do you simply need the numbers tuning in?

The story is pretty simple: Depressed, possibly drunk airman nicks aircraft, either crashes or is shot down. The notion that early investors in your scheme get exclusive first dibs on new information seems distasteful and almost TIGHARian.