Would a Griffon leave a faint smoke trail at full blast? The Schneider Trophy R engines certainly did.

By coincidence I have this on loan from my local library. Whilst it majors on pictures and details of some quality recent restorations, it also has some very interesting pictures of aircraft such as P-40s and Bearcats when they were being used as racers, fire spotters and general fast transpoorts back in the 1950s.

It wasn’t just the British “new concept designs” that failed commercially, it was also many of the much more conventional aircraft too. Most British manufacturers were very much geared towards satisfying technical and performance specifications set by the government – whether for military aircraft or civillian airliners. Whilst military aircraft are invariably “government” driven, airliners are a different kettle of fish. Too often, British airliners were tailored so close to the requirements of the two nationalised airlines (BOAC and BEA) that they proved impossible to sell to anyone else. Indeed, often the national airlines discovered that the planes they had thought they wanted turned out to be inappropriate for their needs so they either cut the orders or asked for a major redesign – ot bought American.

The manufacturers themselves seemed unable (with the odd exception) to think of general market requirements and were just too wedded to the state airlines. The exceptions were aircraft like the BAC 1-11 and later the BAe 146. Even the Viscount (which of course, WAS a success) was based on an Air Ministry specification.

Apart from some black and white footage at the beginning of the film, as far as I know ALL the colour footage was shot specially for the movie. The ground shots of the X-1 feature a full size mock up and the flying shots were actually done with models on wires (no CGI of any note back in 1983).

The F-104 is indeed one of the US based Luftwaffe F-104Gs. I think Yeager had his accident in the NF-104.

I’m pretty sure the B-29 is the CAF’s “Fifi”. The underside would have been painted black to simulate the colours of the B-29 used in the real X-1 drops back in 1947.

Has anyone else noticed the similarity between the tailfin of the TSR2 and the Eurofighter Typhoon?

Most languages tend to put the adjective after the noun. “Red dog” in Irish is “Madra Rua” – “Madra” being “dog” and “rua” being “red”.

In fact, “Madra Rua” is really the Irish for “fox”.

Most Hermes’ had nosewheel gear.

The Vanguard first flew in 1959 by which time the Brabazons (the prototype and second example – which never flew) had both been scrapped. I’d say this picture is from a Farnborough Air Show from around the 1950-52 period.