Meddle you imply that just flying around aimlessly makes no sense or at least to you. So be it but I never got over the wonder of flight and never will.

Not necessarily my personal opinion. I was simply making the observation that to most people the experience of flying is no different to being stuck in a fairly uncomfortable bus for a few hours at a time. If this was your only experience of driving (for example) you probably wouldn’t try and buy a vintage roadster and start driving for the sheer thrill of it.

To me saving up all year to take an airline flight to some vacation spot is totally unattractive. Yes the airlines are just mass transit today – rather take the train if possible.

I was in Venice last week. Getting the train is a possibility, but it would either be at ridiculous cost or ridiculous discomfort. We braved a 3.5 hr railway journey from the Slovenian border back down to Venice, and I wouldn’t have wanted to do much more than that in a single stretch. I’ve looked at taking the train from Edinburgh to London as it is one of those classic railway journeys, but flying was cheaper by far. It is cheaper for me to fly to Amsterdam (and much further afield) than it is to take the ferry to Orkney or Shetland, and that is with the generous subsidies the SG dish out to ferry service providers.

To each his own but I like about reading aviation history but have found that airshows are not worth the trouble – how many simulated attacks on pearl harbor does one need to see.

Luckily not an issue here. I quite liked the two Scottish airshows I attended last year, even with the odd bit of redundancy in displays. Perhaps echoing my earlier post it is hard to avoid a parochial and jingoistic atmosphere, laced with petty nationalism, when it comes to historic aviation at times. You don’t really need to look too far beyond the realm of this forum to see that. I’m surprised at the level of flak the one or two US posters in the Historic threads seem to get, even if they are stating simple truths or at least making fairly objective observations, for one thing. How much the UKIP-lite atmosphere of some corners of this forum are hurting GA I really cannot say, but I doubt it is helping any!

I’ve seen video footage of those Pearl Harbour routines and they seem unbelievably crass, verging on dodgy historic revisionism; something to stir the blood of corpulent hotdog munching rednecks perhaps.

I read this thread a while ago, and then promptly forgot about it. As mentioned in another thread on the same topic, Manfred Mann featured a processed version of this recording on their track ‘As Above So Below’ on the ‘Nightingales and Bombers’ album. I don’t really understand why they used the sample in this track in particular. What is interesting is the stereo separation between the sound of the nightingale and the sound of the bombers on the track. Manfred Mann and co have clearly cut the tape of the bomber engines in a few places, or simply edited out sections with the birdsong, and then punched in a nightingale from another source, such as the EMI sample library.

I presumed that the BBC engineer who captured the original recording would have only been able to record in mono. However, whilst original copies of the recording I’ve heard have been in mono, there is an odd phasing artifact in the sound of the bombers themselves, which could arise from a clumsy mix down of a stereo recording into mono or, alternatively, a wandering tape azimuth on an originally stereo recording. Another possibility is that the bombers and nightingale were recorded at different times and mixed together or otherwise enhanced somehow to create a more poignant mix that enhances one element or the other?

Does anybody know roughly what altitude the bombers will have been passing at and whether we are hearing the full stream passing in a couple of waves or simply a smaller subset of the bombers listed by David_Kavangh above? Perhaps a daft question, but because I will never get to see or hear a ‘bomber stream’ in the flesh I am curious as to what exactly I am hearing.

So Steve Hackett gets off scot-free? :highly_amused:

Having read the key “facts” in the Government’s brochure it is a mixture of actual facts, contentious and arguable “facts” and a series of assumptions based on the forgoing. All those assumptions being highly debatable, since no one KNOWS what will happen if and when we leave. So as far as giving the people the facts they are seeking those glossy pages are a very long way from meeting those demands.

Exactly like the SNP’s ‘white paper’ then? There is one of those weighty tomes in our office still, serving as a paper weight…

Would it be simple fare for the Reds to move on to T2s?

Either they find new homes or the ‘Old museum exhibits that probably didn’t survive’ thread gets a few new entries. 😎

Out of sheer curiosity, will the Vampire find a new home? They seem to be fairly well represented in museums across the UK.

So the UN-1D was actually a 2T-1A?

I’ll get my coat.