cartoon rubbish CGI with a script that makes it clear that the film’s intended audience is the mentally sub-normal.

Very nice. The film’s intended audience is not elderly anoraks but teenagers, specifically male African-American teenagers who badly need role models, since they are far too often children without fathers, in a single-parent household.

For three hours each week, in my local Tuskegee Airmen chapter’s Lee Archer Red Tail Flying Program, I teach and mentor exactly such a group of “mentally sub-normal” individuals. This year and last year, one each of our mentally sub-normal minority students, out of a class of a dozen and a half, was accepted to a U. S.college called Harvard. This year, another has been accepted to the U. S. Naval Academy, better know to the mentally sub-normal among us as Annapolis.

All three of them, as well as all the rest of my students, were thrilled to see “Red Tails.”

The first chapter is 469 pages? There aren’t many entire books that long.

I put a lot of hours on Flying Magazine’s Shrike Commander, all over the U. S., the Bahamas and the Caribbean. (Those were the days…)

Real BTO (Big Time Operator) airplane, great big yoke, fistful of throttles.

Ours was very handsomely outfitted, with four-leather-chair club seating and a small bar between the rear two seats, complete with an ice cabinet. Flying one day on a trip with a girlfriend (as I said, those were the days), she had to pee, but I’d gotten us up into a nice tailwind at 11.5 or so, maybe 13.5, and I didn’t want to give up the altitude to land, so I told her to just use the [empty] ice bucket, which she did.

Couldn’t help chuckling to myself thereafter whenever I was acting as the Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.’s quasi-corporate pilot with a quartet of suits in the back, and I’d hear one or another of them say, “Another drink, Ed? Scotch on the rocks, was it?”

Why was this initially posted on a modelling forum?

Because it’s a model.

People are saying that modellers couldn’t be that good…

If so, they know little about serious scale modeling, and what knowledge they do have probably extends about as far as the $19.95 plastic-toy kits that are top-of-the-line in Walmarts. And of course some of the best scale modelers don’t even use kits; they scratchbuild.

If a hoax why would you go to such levels to fool people? A lesser effort would of fooled many.

But here he has perhaps fooled the putative experts, who will go on for many more pages debating this silliness. That could be very satisfying to somebody who hasn’t wasted effort, as you imply; he has (perhaps, not sayin’) had great fun in creating a diorama that currently sits on his bookshelf, or wherever, while for years to come he will tell his pals that it was the source of The Great FlyPast P-40 Hoax.

Though perhaps he’s a she.

Do you think he might have been referring to model building (the subject of the website) as being “A Waste Of Time” when he created that handle all those years ago?

Lots of us scale modelers do, in obvious jest…

If that’s a model diorama, he certainly has all the details right, including little things like the ball in the turn-and-bank being positioned correctly for the airplane’s tilt. Which is unusual: modelers have been known to make stunningly realistic models with both ailerons deflected down, or the stick in the cockpit hard left and the ailerons deflected for a right bank. (I’m a modeler, though also a pilot…)