Erm, it says in the post. But just in case my laptop is playing a cruel trick on me, Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown with Dennis Bancroft, Peter Amos and Josh Spoor.

Dean. 🙂

It looks like a hand fuel pump, looks like a piece of instrumentation near the midrift of the man on the left handside. Imagine having to pump fuel in the heat of the day.I wouldn’t like to have to move the rig either, it doesn’t appear to have any tyres! On a rough desert airfield that wouldn’t be much fun. But these were the days when men were men and you did your job and didn’t moan (or so i’m told). Edit again- is the man on the right pedalling? Ingenius!

Dean

Aero engines have featured quite heavily in LSR vehicles. The Liberty engine was used in aircraft cars and boats. An interesting story is that of ‘Triplex’, a vehicle powered by no less than three Liberty engines. The car was incredibly dangerous and killed its driver, Lee Bible. The first person on the scene of the accident was Henry Seagrave, who vowed to never attempt the Land Speed Record again. Instead, he concentrated on the Water Speed Record. It was when attempting the WSR record that Seagrave had the accident that which resulted in his death.

From what I have been told, I would be most surprised if the Quicksilver Project ever comes to fruition. I do hope that Bloodhound is a winner, I just hope that it doesn’t end in a fashion similar to Parry Thomas, who met his end on Pendine Sands. It is encouraging to see that Britain still has the will to carry on with projects such as LSR, harking back to the early days of LSR and WSR (not to mention the Air Speed Record, I highly recommend Faster Than The Sun by Peter Twiss, a great read) when men took on these challenges just because somebody said it couldn’t be done. If only we could foster this spirit more in modern britain, an admirable aspect of the Bloodhound Project is its education prorgramme, bringing young and old alike into engineering.

Waffle over.

Dean

V903, do you have an approximate landing time at Bruntingthorpe (or does 4pm still stand?), we’re hoping to head over and see her touch down if possible.

Any help much appreciated,

All the best,

Dean

Im pretty certain they were Spitfires 🙂 , then again they may have been Heinkels…lucky you flying into Spanhoe, I was there for the Market Garden event last week, great place.

PS853 finished over our house, what a sight and sound! To who ever was flying the machine, many thanks!!!!!
Dean

I’ve gone for aviation related instead of direct aviation, i’m just over week into an apprenticeship with Rolls Royce Derby. Early days, but i’m loving it. I’ll come out with a minimum of two NVQ’s (Level 2+3 in Performing Engineering Operations) and a BTEC (Operations and Maintenance, I start this soon and will know more then). After that, who knows, I can do pretty much whatever I want providing I keep up my side of the deal- lots of hard work.

Granted this isn’t the route becoming an aircraft engineer, but less than 20ft from my work shop is a world class collection of aero engines- both sides of the walls. The door to the left and I get an eyeful of Trent 1000, or Trent 900 and anything else in that day, go right and I can go from Merlin to Pegasus to Trent 800 in 30ft, with a sit in a Canberra cockpit if I want it.

These jobs are out there, you have to look for them, and want it bad enough. I believe the programme reopens for 2009 applications in November. And being far away from site is no excuse, I know somebody who moved from London to Bristol to be able to do this job.

Just another idea for the pot.

Dean