Snoopy7422Bob, are these the Bakelite ones that you have to reach your finger over the top of and push downwards into a kind of pocket….?
Snoopy7422Nothing in todays ‘Educational’ environment surprises me any more…. (:-/)
Snoopy7422What a pity, I was very much looking forward to seeing this superb machine in the air again. Let’s hope that it get’s to the front of the queue…;)
Snoopy7422Now I know what a ‘gizzit’ is…. Splendid…..! :love-struck:
Snoopy7422I don’t know what a ‘gizzit’ is, but now that you have piqued our interest, I think that you are dutybound to post a photo…! :p
Snoopy7422Great to see the Tomtit nearly ready to rumble again. There were three at VACBAF used during the early part of the war. One was written-off, there was the one above still flying….what happened to the other one… G-AFVV I think….? I seem to recall that it was w/o in the 1950’s….
The Comet looks lovely. What’s happening with it now…? It was supposed to be back in the air last Spring. Are there any technical issues preventing it from flying now….is there a plan/program to fly it…?
Snoopy7422Stap’me vitals, I had no idea Hughesdon was still alive. Well I’m jiggered, how extraordinary. He led quite a life. One hundred and four years of age too, I’ll raise a glass to that…!
Snoopy7422Very sorry to hear this, – sad news indeed. Fact is, we are losing airfields at an alarming rate. Adding a few muddy farm strips is no substitute either. Airfields suffer from being regarded as ‘Brownfield sites’ from a Planning point of view. John the Windbag Prescott was supposed to have stopped all this destruction of infrastructure years ago, but nothing came of it. The property developers just see these airfields as building plots – and the councils now just see them as a money-spinner too. Unless some sort of effective protection is put in place, we are going to lose a LOT more too.
Snoopy7422What a brilliant bit of filming, – absolutely Top Hole..! I’ve always had a soft-spot for Aunty, she so ugly she’s beautiful…..and what superb scenery too…. I always adored that opening to Where Eagles Dare too. Lovely to see the Ju in winter camouflage and the scenery was terrific. The rest of the film was hokum, but again, the settings superb.
Ron Goodwin wrote a lot of really superb film music. Some years ago I attended a superb Wings and Strings at Yeovilton. Ron Goodwin was there to conduct all the favourites. A Spit flew the final air-component against a glorious setting sun with the orchestra at full bore. Hardly a dry eye in the audience. In the evening, we were treated to Sir George Martin conducting many of the classic tunes with which he is so closely associated too. What a treat… 😉
Snoopy7422Just in case anyone was thinking of acquiring one of these in a rash moment of enthusiasm….. They are very, VERY heavy, – even without the batteries. They have no suspension, so they are no good to use on the road either. We have one which we rebuilt. We fabricated a removable handle, like the earlier type, but on grass, you need a Rugby team to shift the bhugga anyway. Fortunately, we’ve also replaced the military coupling with a standard towing socket so we can use a small tractor unit with a ball fitted.
We cut-off a lot of surplus metalwork, in an attempt to lighten it, but it was still very heavy. We use a single battery with a small generator – which is still much lighter than the original huge batteries. The lid was a bit too low, so we had to raise it a tad to clear, but it’s hinged to allow the generator to run without overheating. It’s usable – just……but not without some mechanical to help on grass to shift it…! We still use the original lead and socket.
Mind you, it looks good…!
(Given the choice again, I’d use a really light four-wheeled cart that can probably be picked-up cheap as chips from Machine Mart or similar.).
Snoopy7422A lot of people think that the current situation in politics in the UK is very stale. Too many ex-‘Researchers’ partyers, too few people that have had real jobs and real life experience. As a bit of an old git, I’ve seen a lot of the political shenanigans over the years. Will UKIP be forming the next UK Government..? No. Will they be getting into Government in the foreseeable future? No. What they ARE doing however, is forcing the other three very stale groups of navel-gazers to stop and think – and start, very belatedly, listening to what ‘Joe Public’ is thinking and saying.
Do UKIP have available a cadre of very switched-on people to act as candidates? Again – No. Does that matter…? Actually again – no, as they aren’t getting real power. What they are doing – and will continue to do now, is to influence debate and policy. They are manifestly driving debate on certain issues that, factually, have not been properly debated and which the Electorate have not been consulted upon. This is now changing….
Do UKIP have ‘racist’ members..? Yes, in the same way as all the other Party’s do. They represent some sort of cross-section of society. I think the point about Lenny Henry was perfectly valid, – but then of course, since the whole ‘racism’ issue is a completely hypocritical one-way street, the reaction was wholly and tediously predictable. If, as some here have asserted, it was OK/acceptable for Henry to assert one way, what then would have been said if some other TV personality had asserted a similar view of the ‘under representation of ‘white’ people on TV’. Ah yes…of course, they’d have been ‘racist’. I’m not arguing the truth of either assertion, but clearly, there is massive hypocrisy at work, – as usual.
Me – I blame the word, – imported, along with a lot of other loopy ideas, from the USA in the 1960’s. We had a word, ‘racialism’. It was perfectly fine and functional. This new term, however, came with a whole trainload of baggage from a society that recently had slavery – to one that has not.
Last night, on Newsnight, we had a perfect manifestation of all this absurdity. There was a woman on there (I think the Shadow Minister for something or other..) who was co-oordinating a ‘Cross-Party campaign against UKIP’. Whatever happened to democracy and free-speech…? Clearly, – ‘Free-Speech’ should, they think, only be available to their cosy little expense-fiddling club…. Very revealing methinketh.
I don’t give a toss about the shortcomings of UKIP. What I DO care about, is that they are causing the overpaid fat-cats of the Westminster Elite to do something that seems, hithertoo, quite alien to them, the which is to actually LISTEN to the Electorate. Now that HAS to be a ‘Good Thing’…..
Snoopy7422Just watched both of those – excellent stuff. I hope Les Munro gets to see the new film, so come on PJ – look smart…! Jackson is a great guy too. Fantastic that he uses his wealth in such a positive way.
Galipoli was such a carve-up. My Grandfather and his brother were both in the Andrew – they joined before the outbreak. His brothers ship was at Gallipoli and was hit so many time it was a floating wreck – I have the photos that he sent home somewhere – it was like a colander, but at least he survived, which so many didn’t.
Snoopy7422Good Luck, there is a lot of history in that area to celebrate.
Snoopy7422It’s amazing to think that biplanes were still quite prevalent at the end of the 1930’s – essentially Great War technology, and yet before the end of the Second war, we had jets most of the way to Mach 1, Ballistic missiles and the A-Bomb – a mere five years or so. There is no doubt that the Americans were ahead of the game in terms of Civil Aviation in the 1930’s, which I think was driven to a great extent by the sheer distances, greater space for runways and a greater prevalence of paved surfaces in the U.S. In the U.K, with much shorter routes, less land and almost no paved runways, (Not to mention worse weather..!) there simply wasn’t the impetus, with the exception of some of the Imperial Airways routes. The UK had the larger Commercial monoplanes just about appearing before the war broke-out.
In any case, the Americans had large stressed-skin monocoque aircraft, with retracts, VP airscrews and flaps. They were not just for show either, they were in regular service years before the war. It’s a little arbitrary, but I tend to think of 1930 as being a watershed. In the 1920’s, most a/c were still essentially ‘First Generation’. At the start of the 1930’s, all these older norms started to be phased-out. This is why for me, the 1930’s ‘Second Generation’ developments are so fascinating, as they were the first ‘modern’ aircraft.
The other facet of the 1930’s is the flying itself. This moved-on from very basic piloting skills to the use of early R/T, RNav and the genesis of RADAR etc. All the big records were set and the pioneering flights made, so that, by the outbreak of the war, all the records had been set and the airways were open for business.
Of course, quite a few of these pioneers and record setters met sticky, or at least tragic ends. Some, like Black, were killed flying in the 1930’s, Mollison and Scott took to the bottle, Johnson was killed in a silly accident during the war, to name but a few.
By the end of the war, young aircrew, with relatively little experience – but much better training – were routinely carrying out long-distance, long endurance flights that, only a scant few years earlier, would have made them national heroes. Such things are perhaps a real measure of progress.
To that extent, AE doubtless found greater fame in her demise than she would ever have otherwise had. I’m quite baffled however, as to why the likes of TIGHAR are so obsessed. All the fact are available and she is well documented and her fame firmly marked. We know, give or take a bit where she ditched, and as the search for MH370 in the Indian Ocean has recently illustrated, such vast expanses can easily swallow the largest of a/c – without trace. So, no mystery at all really in AE’s case.
What is clear though, is that she was a good pilot – and consistently so. Sadly, on that fateful leg of her flight, she made a bad call in leaving some of the radios behind. Noonan seems to have been an excellent navigator, but to expect to find a tiny island – in all the vastness of the Pacific, primarily by DR and luck……… Yep, a bad and fatal call.
Snoopy7422Three Cheers For The ‘Golden Age’.
Presume you mean ‘AE’….. 😉 Nice to see a post up about the interwar period. Much as the war years are interesting, that focus tends to leave the interwar years rather neglected. Most of the easily available literature and film cover the ’39-’45 period. However, the bedrock of aeronautical excellence was laid down well before the war, driven by record-setting, racing and the emergence of serious commercial aviation. There were some towering figures, many of whom, and their exploits, would be quite unknown to many. The meteoric progress of aviation really started to deliver during the 1930’s, and of course, AE was deeply involved.
I always get the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the Americans remember this period more actively than we do in the UK. That’s a pity, because Britain was right at the heart of this era of rapid progress and pioneering flights.
As an aside – I haven’t managed to get around to reading either of Mary Lovell’s books you mention, but did read the superb West With The Night. Whoever actually wrote the tome, it’s still superb! Although it was a little disappointing in terms of it’s aviation content, it was very revealing in terms of BM character and also her network of contacts. BM herself seems to have been a rather larger than life character who lived her life just how she wanted and wasn’t in the least bit bothered about the chattering classes. She was taught to fly by none other than Tom CB, and of course knew the Blixens of ‘Out Of Africa’ fame, as well as many others in that circle in those heady days of Empire.
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