removed

– anyone can drive a vintage car and walk away from the experience alive without any further training
– you can keep it/them at home, and relatively little space is required
– hardly any red tape involved with operating a car

Cars are just so much more accessible and practical.

]

These are not the reasons why people bay $35 to $50 million for vintage cars. Not even close.

A Cruel and Uncalled for comment.

My “comment”? Hardly a comment, I asked a question. What am I missing? Perhaps the fact that we all should be reverential? I’m writing about this first flight for Aviation History magazine and prefer to get it right rather than simply worshipful.

I ferried a couple of 206s from Shoreham to the U. S. It was a totally uncompetitive light twin–heavy, overbuilt, expensive, uneconomical. And one of its major failings was that the tadpole fuselage was unstretchable. Lucky it lasted as long as it did.

That airplane hit the ground intact, at a 15-degree nosedown attitude and under power. I suspect that thunderstorm had less to do with the crash than is superficially assumed. If I had been the Rhodesian NTSB, I’d have surmised that Malloch died of a heart attack, perhaps exacerbated by having suddenly flown into hail. If you watch the video taken from the Vampire moments before the storm penetration, there doesn’t seem to be anything like a towering Cu in the area–just lots of apparently typical afternoon weather for the area. Not saying they didn’t hit hail, but I’ve flown into worse, by the look of it. Probably dumb of me, but I survived. I don’t think Malloch had any idea that he was doing anything unusual or inexplicable.