modern type names such as “737” really now mean as little as “iPhone” or “BMW 3 Series”. The are brandings to identify market niche, not actual model designations.

Which is why the professionals who fly them refer to their particular type as a “738” (737-800) or a “744” (747-400), etc.

Watching the BBC drama ‘Spies in Warsaw’ I’m left wondering why the BBC thought that using an AOP Mk V Auster to represent a French military aircraft in 1939 would be acceptable.

Because 99.99 percent of the audience wouldn’t have cared if they’d used a Cherokee Six. it’s a drama, not a training film.

Go start your own film company, see what it’s like when you have to climb out of the overstuffed armchair. (Yes, I do know what it’s like to make films. Three I’ve written were nominated for Academy Awards. Just short documentaries, admittedly, but I probably have you beat.)

Was the aircraft beyond repair ?

Probably beyond repair by whatever maintenance facilities they had on an aircraft carrier.

This is just a sign of how the modern Internet pseudo-journalistic sites feed on each other. This was originally published a few days ago in Slate, and now its competitor Huffington Post–a pure aggregator–has gone and copped it.

Even funnier is that this is ancient news, perhaps even non-news. The pre-nup has been published in every substantial Earhart biography for the last 30 years, yet the Slate author claimed to have “stumbled across it,” as she put it, in the Purdue University archives. (She’d have saved a lot of time by Googling it.)

These poor bloggers are so driven to publish something, anything, that they’ll soon be posting that the sun comes up in the east. And then the -real- news, that actually the sun isn’t “coming up” at all…

George was Putnam, by the way, not Putman.

With a magnifying glass, I’m betting the artist’s first name is Bruce and the last name might be Crandell or Crandall…which is odd, since my wife’s last name is Crandell.

Good thing TIGHAR–or Ric Gillespie–would never bother to sue you, since some forum members haven’t been a bit shy about calling Gillespie everything from a scammer to a con man to a ripoff artist, and they haven’t been a bit shy about maintaining that he’s using contributed funds for personal purposes.

Whether or not that’s the case with this hurricane in a hotpot, I have no idea. Never looked at the Spitfire Heritage Trust thread, since it never was a subject in which I was interested.