Indeed, what is going to happen to BM ? Does anybody know what’s going on?

The USAF shot down the 315th and last QF-4 from Tyndall last month

I posted a photo about this on the Aeroplane Icons Twitter page last week 🙂

Do please “Follow” our page. Not much babble, mostly photographs, some of which will hopefully be of interest 🙂

Define ‘many’!
I was waiting for that line. Strangely, I don’t have figures to hand. Perhaps you might care to offer figures to support the opposing view? Let’s not waste time on this, I think you’ve clarified your position here: – If the last publicly viewable telephone box was painted blue then I would accept it in the wrong colour, because I would be glad that I got to see the damn thing at all.
Back to what I’ve already said twice before. There are two opposing views on this matter. You clearly fall into one and I fall into the other. I can’t even understand how anyone could regard ludicrous paint schemes as anything but awful. You can’t understand why anyone would care what colour an aeroplane is painted. Never the twain shall meet. It’s that simple! 🙂

You really do need to accept that comments like this – paintwork will have only upset a token few – is completely, utterly wrong. Just because it isn’t your view doesn’t mean that your view prevails. It doesn’t.

Oh, and as for the dismissive comments about modellers, I accept that a lot of the discussions on the forum you mention are nonsense but that forum doesn’t represent the wider hobby at all. Modellers do indeed obsess over what some people might think is trivia, but you have to understand that what interests one person doesn’t interest another. You might think discussing a colour hue or reference number is absurd but others do not. You might care to understand that “modelling” isn’t always about children sticking Airfix kits together with glue-covered fingers. Some extremely knowledgeable people are/were modellers and their knowledge of colour schemes and unit markings has been of great value, not least in preserving many aspects of aviation heritage. The late, great Alan Hall was an avid modeller, for example, and many other leading historians are/were too. A great deal of historical data is recorded precisely because of these strange individuals that you refer to. You might even care to note that more than a few preserved aircraft are painted/finished precisely the way they are because of material that has been supplied by modellers. Some flying examples have done likewise. So let’s not sneer at such matters just because you don’t happen to understand them. The pejorative tone of your comments is – to say the least – a little unfair! 🙂

It is almost ironic that we were told for years that it would be engine life or availability that would eventually ground XH558. Now we’re told it’s not 🙁

I have a sneaking suspicion that if XH558 did lose an engine it would still somehow make its way back to Finningley. It wouldn’t be the first Vulcan to take-off on three… just don’t tell the CAA 🙂

er, yes, exactly, what F-4Js? Did we miss something?

We could open a full forum to discuss the garbage that is spewed-out by TV and newspapers on aviation subjects. It’s mostly complete nonsense written by idiots. The real worry is that when you know the aviation stories are garbage, you have to wonder just how accurate all the other stories are too 🙂