RE: Duxford get-together Sun 5th Jan

God, I can relate to that-I’m pig sick of being on the ‘wrong side’ of the country (South Wales) for anything good! Used to have dear old RAF St Athan just up the road, but that show’s gone now, and I refuse to go to the IAT at Fairford even though that’s only 60 miles or so away. I tried Cosford in the Midlands last year and it would have been fine apart from the terrible weather, so I may give that another go next year-forecast depending-but generally speaking, the South and East have WAY too much airshow coverage, at the expense of everywhere else.

Controversial comment time-

Instead of Duxford having the same airshow four or five times a year, or whatever it is now, it would be nice to see the same aircraft…well, actually GO somewhere(!) and for there to be a decent oldies airshow a little more central to the country! There was I thinking ‘Great!’ when ‘Great Warbirds’ moved to Wroughton…briefly.

I shall now run and hide, and return you to the main topic…

RE: Hendon chaos!

No doubt if the Gents at Hendon ran out of bog paper, they’d say it was ‘down to re-arranging for the new building’, so I suspect that’s the answer to everything else there for now, too.

RE: Replica Me 262 has flown!!

Getting back on topic for a mo, (sorry about that!) that ‘262 is a GREAT sight.

RE: Lancaster Bomber update

Woo-hoo! Nice pictures! Good to see that you’ve actually got an interior in yours, unlike the CWH machine!

RE: Goshawk Squadron

As long as we remember that it’s a work of FICTION, then reading ‘Piece Of Cake’ is very enjoyable-those that criticise it tend to be the sort who take things WAY too seriously! Personally, I treasure my signed first edition hardback and letter that I got from Robinson himself some years ago.

Talking of ‘Kellaway’, he crops up also in the POC ‘sequel’ ‘A Good Clean Fight’, which is quite a different sort of book, set this time in the desert and with a few other POC characters in it-Fanny Barton, though living through the BoB has REALLY changed his character, Skull the inteligence officer, and there’s even a mention of dear old Moggy in there, too!

RE: British camouflage patterns

Well, I’ve seen archive film of a Lanc wing being spray-painted freehand by a guy in the factory! Though it did look like he was filling in someone elses’ outline, which may well have been applied with some form of mask.

Paint jobs seem to rarely be as pristine and precise as modern restorations/reference sources would have us believe-not only were these weapons of war, but any machines that did hang around for any length of time ended up with all sorts of ‘non-standard’ paint jobs on them-famous Lancaster S-Sugar being just one small example, if you study the stills/film of her around the time of her ‘100th’ op, you’ll see for example that the line where the camoflage paint stops and the black undersides starts is totally wrong, very rough, and is generally all over the place!