I can just remember the Cierva Rota autogyros flapping about circa1940. We were told they delivered the RAF mail to Hawkinge which was nearby. I learnt many years later that they were in fact being used to calibrate the radars which saved our bacon in the BoB

My father served in both wars. Here he is behind his machine gun in WWI

He was sent to India and from there to a place he called Messpot (Mesopotamia, nowadays Iraq). There he saw action against the Kurds and described taking his gun by night to face a Kurdish force the next morning, where they were gunned down as they advanced against our army.

He was a tailor all his life and volunteered for the Balloon Barrage in WWII, aged 43. He reasoned that tailors would be needed to sew up the balloons, but ended up being part of a balloon crew. He was posted to Dover, and described having 3 balloons shot off his barge in one day. Where we live we could see these balloons if they were flown at a reasonable height and could see the Jerries shooting them down. We lived about 8 miles from Dover and he would cycle home to see us when he could, and bike back in the blackout through the back roads.

His older brother Edgar served in the army in WWI in France and Messpot, where he swam across the Tigris at Baghdad and ended up in the same hospital as my father, who had malaria. Edgar joined the RAF before WWII having lost his job in the 30’s depression. He went to France with the BEF in 1939 and told us how at one time he occupied a billet where he had also lived in WWI. He was a driver and in the shambles of May-June 1940 got his lorry onto a ship in western France and drove it home to us in East Kent. Here he spent about a week awaiting instructions with the lorry parked outside our bungalow. He was then sent to Malta and lost his life in an air raid there in early 1942.

My little service, luckily for me, was after the war and I did 8 years in the RAF, serving as a night fighter navigator on 2 squadrons. One tour being in the Muddle East which I have boasted about in other threads.

I served on 39sqdn in 1952-4with the Mosquito NF36, paddle blades props and all. We were required to do practice single engine landings and overshoots, including at night. Nobody bent one but I know it was very easy to do. When flying on one engine the first requirement was to check safety speed, i.e. The speed at which the pilot could still hold the rudder pedal load and keep straight and level. This speed was normally about 137 knots with a fair amount of power to the live engine.
The minimum height to commence overshoot was 300ft by day and 800 by night. This was to enable the aircraft to be dived to get up to a speed to enable it to climb, the undercart had to be retracted as soon as poss as it created so much drag that acceleration was minimal.
All good clean fun

Permit me a little boasting, and I apologise profusely in advance.

When I was crewed up with my Polish pilot on the night fighter OCU at Leeming, on the Mosquito in 1951, our first flight together is down in my log book as “sector recce”. This was a standard trip at a new unit so one could learn about the local area. Anyhow he had been employed during the war on Mosquitos and had told me stories of train busting etc. So on this first trip he casually asked “Would you like to do some low flying ?”. As a green as grass, ultra keen, 19 year old I jumped at it. We were over the nice rolling countryside of the Cleveland Hills in NE Yorkshire and he proceeded to follow the ground up and over these. At about the third one, as we crested the top, a farmhouse loomed up in front and I distinctly remember we did a little jink and we crossed the farmyard beside the house at about gutter level. Over the following few years that I spent with him we had other similar occasions when the opportunity arose.

I met the nav with whom he had flown during the war and recounted that tale. The response was “He was testing you out”

Watched hundreds of those effing things for real. FFS bring on something to shoot it down.

Re knots/mph, i believe the changeover took place sometime about 1945

The aerial array look as if it was the old AI Mk4, so seems an oddity. There is an RAF Proctor in the background so pic must be in UK

Raking over the ashes again won’t find anything new.
I was blown out of bed about a month after that event by a doodlebug, the V1 German revenge weapon. This damaged about 150 houses in our village, or about 90% of the total. So I was all in favour of more German towns getting the same treatment, after all they had started the process in 1915 with their Zeppelins.
The bleeding hearts have made enough noise, time they piped down.