I knew Sikorsky’s trials began in 1940.

However, Focke-Wulf DID fly a helicopter. In 1938, Hannah Reitsch demonstrated the Focke Wulf Fw61 in the Berlin Sportshalle to an amazed public. She rose vertically, flew forwards, backways and sideways under full control.

The background to how Focke Wulf became Focke Achgelis is interesting. It appears G (Guenther?) Wulf was not a great fan of the Nazi Party. He was therefore “encouraged” to leave his position as a director in the company which was subsequently taken over by the giant AEG concern. Focke then established a new company with Gerd Achgelis to continue research into helicopter designs. Hence all future designs from Focke were from his new company, Focke-Achgelis.

Kurt Tank took over as chief designer of the old Focke-Wulf company after the AEG takeover.

Sorry about the mix up over the years.

Post war the French aircraft industry was nationalised and split into geographical regions for no real logical reasons apart from civil service administrative ones. Thus you got:

Sud Est (South East) – later Sud Aviation
Nord Est (North East) – later Nord Aviation

Is SNEB an abbreviation of Sud/Nord-Est?

All ended up amalgamated into Aerospatiale in 1970.

“Talk Down” was pretty good. Has Brian Lecomber written any other novels?

I sometimes enjoy the Dale Brown USAF stories. Pot boiler nonsense really but pretty good on the technical front – a sort of poor man’s Tom Clancy.

Was it Jeremy Clarkson who said that he would not read a fiction book unless it had a painting of a Stealth Bomber on the cover?

The “Great Planes” video on the B-36 features some footage of the B-60 on its maiden flight.

Ugly is as ugly does.

Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.

A very subjective topic I’m sure but here are my suggestions:

Fairey Barracuda – an extremely “messy” looking aircraft.
Short Sturgeon – more like a guppy than a sturgeon.
Blackburn Rippon – a pre-war naval bi-plane.
Blacburn Baffin – another navy ‘plane from the 1920s.
Peu-de-Ciel – weird and couldn’t even fly very well.
Brewster Buffalo – porky and obsolete when put into use.
Budd Canestoga – a one off freighter similar to the later ATL Carvair.

Funny how the Royal Navy seems to feature a lot when it comes to ugly aircraft.

I certainly wouldn’t include the Me163 or Wellesley as “ugly” aircraft. In fact, I think they are quite eye catching in an “interesting” way and they were both very innovative in their time.

Treason is a redundant term these days – ask Clare Short.

I read recently that the last Briton to be executed was Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce – who was actually Irish and probably suffered a mistrial – but that’s another story).

Regarding the Falklands, most of the TV pictures tended to arrive about two weeks after the events they were depicting. Ironically, British TV could get Argentian TV pictures much quicker (like “same day”).

Obviously deltas don’t (normally) have tailplanes. However, the effect is the same as having a low mounted tailplane.

It does not answer the question though. A prime example of the conservative approach of the UK aviation industry was the Gloster Javelin – being a delta AND having a high mounted tailplane.

The argument as to where to place the tailplane on early jets is quite interesting. Many of the early designs (262, Meteor etc) had the tailplane mounted mid way up or near the top of the tail fin.

I know that a major row broke out between English Electric and the RAE over where to put the tailplane on the P1/Lightning. The RAE insisted it should be high mounted whilst EE wanted it set low down. The Shorts SB5 was built specifically to try out various tailplane positions before the P1/Lightning design was finalised. The RAE were wrong on this occasion and a low set tail was selected. In fact, all military jet fighters and bombers today feature low set tailplanes.

Why were high tails so popular early on?