reads like a tabloid piece of trash. says a lot for the credibility of afm that they’ll publish such bilge, with a snippet from the editor as well. sheesh. mark one more up for the falling standards of defence journalism worldwide.

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

(Theodore Roosevelt, Paris Sorbonne, 1910)

the problem is that janes has few quality personnel working for them, compared to the volume of information they handle. so while they are regarded with keen interest over the stuff they get from airshows, trade expos and industry events which are basically all the released data from corporations, their analysis and local reports are very hit and miss.

so for the west coverage is great, in fact startling. but for asian countries, including india for instance, their coverage is pathetic. their local correpsondent is rahul bedi. who cant recognise a t-72 from a bmp or an agni from a trishul. its somewhat embarassing really. on the one hand theres christopher foss and on the other rahul bedi.

A problem faced by all defence publishers – including Jane’s – is the global lack of quality personnel able to handle defence journalism. It would be great to have a Christopher Foss equivalent in a dozen countries around the world, alas there is but one, and he’s in the UK.

This shortage of good defence writers was a source of great embarrassment to the old International Defense Review during the 1970s. Although based in Switzerland, it desperately wanted to have an international staff lineup, but in practice many of its editorial team were British.

It wasn’t that a benevolent deity had blessed the UK with high defence-reporting skills – the key factor was that the UK had a large number of small defence magazines in those days, most with only one or two writers and some with a larger number. I don’t know of any other country that had such a large number of ‘cottage industry’ defence publications. These titles made extensive use of freelance journalists and even local enthusiasts. They were the training ground in which many now grey-haired defence reporters got started.

Aerospace and defence magazines are always on the lookout for good foreign correspondents – journalists with a track record, and with specialised aerospace or defence expertise. They are a rare breed, and if you find one, he is unlikely to be an all-rounder. He may understand tanks, but not submarines, airliners but not combat aircraft, and so on.

A general-purpose reporter from a quality newspaper can provide some defence coverage for a specialist title, but to many of them all grey-painted ships fitted with guns are ‘battleships’ and all green or sand-coloured metal boxes on tracks are ‘tanks’.

Very eye-catching pix. How do you get your subjects looking so well-lit? Your photos show the aircraft fairly evenly lit from nose to tail…

Presumably the monopod is letting you use longer exposures than are possible hand-held, but it’s the evenness of lighting along the length of the aircraft that surprises me.

My experience of the Hendon bomber hall is that with ISO 800, an f.2.8 lens, and a shutter speeds of 1/30, the front of some aircraft is at best getting about one stop of underexposure, and the back end is often in a gloom where Photoshop trickery can only improve things at the price of exposing lots of digital noise.

If the plan is to meet at the restaurant at 10am, what’s the fall-back plan in the event that:

1 the restaurant turns out to be closed in the morning

2 individuals are delayed by London’s highly-reliable public transport system

An RAF wall chart of the mid-1970s gave the combat ceiling of the Lightning as 72,000ft.

This figure totally freaked the defence editor of ‘Flight’ when he saw it! But from then onwards, that was the figure used in the magazine’s annual Military Aircraft Survey.

Does ‘Flight’ still tackle those Surveys? They used to do military aircraft, airliners, aero engines, air forces, and missiles. From memory, in the 1980s, they scaled them back to the point where they became little more than data tables.

A great pity – they were a valuable (and affordable) resource. In the late 1950s I used to buy the missile survey issue when I was an aerospace apprentice at the princely wage of £2 a week.

I realise the F-16XL was a NASA demonstrator aircraft, but how come it never became a operational variant? The wing area added gave the F-16XL a staggering 82% increase in fuel, stores for up to 28 bombs and the combat radius was also greater, I wonder what the down sides must have been? The F-15E must have been chosen perhaps?

My hair was brown and not grey in those far-off days, but I recall that the F-16XL was extensively evaluated, but rejected in favour of the F-15E.

I should be able to make it on Dec 1.