Tornado – you are talking nonsense. You are letting your wholly unfettered irrational loathing of firearms suppress any rational debate about them, so that you keep trotting out the same remarks. So let’s just accept you don’t like them, but that many of us can find arguments both for and against in differing circumstances.

If by soul you mean the “essence” of the person that dies with them. If you refer to some spectral component of the individual then we are entering the realms of fantasy.

Didn’t I read somewhere that some of them are destined to repace the JPs at Cosford for the engineering training?

Your argument that they are accidents waiting to happen could be applied equally to cars, mororcycles, aircraft and any number of other devices which can kill if misused.

I would respect your distaste for guns per se, if you had a more rational reason for your loathing of them. Your only argument seems to be that they can kill. Well, yes, that’s true, when loaded, they can be fired and could kill. So what’s new?

Hopefully everyone will be satisfied now!

Following the huge effort of the Engineering Team in fixing the leak in No.2 (Starboard) fuel tank, resulting in the aircraft returning to full serviceability last Friday, XH558 experienced a hydraulic failure after take-off on Sunday en-route to Dunsfold “Wings and Wheels”. This happened during a practice display over Rutland Water.

The crew called a ‘Pan Pan’ which is standard practice in such a situation, and as a precaution diverted to RAF Coninsgby to land without incident with the aid of the braking parachute. Sadly, we had to inform everyone by Twitter and Facebook that there would be no further flight that day.

Martin Withers, Pilot in Command, said “We chose RAF Coningsby as their runway is long and was directly into wind, giving us far less braking. He continued, “It was just standard procedure given the circumstances we faced with fluctuating hydraulic pressure being indicated.”

Following initial diagnosis once our team had arrived indicating that a hydraulic seal had failed in the nose undercarriage system, it was clear that the necessary rectification, refilling, bleeding and testing of the hydraulic system would take several days. We sadly had no alternative than to advise Dunsfold and our supporters that the display on the Monday would also need to be cancelled.

Engineering Director Andrew Edmondson and Chief Engineer “Taff” Stone have been at RAF Coningsby today to make arrangements for XH558 to go into one of the hangars there. Work will commence tomorrow; there will be a “go/no go” decision on next weekend’s planned sorties on Friday. Our sincere thanks are due to all at RAF Coningsby for being so helpful following this unfortunate problem.

It is such a shame that the very good reliability record of XH558 for most of this season has now been sullied by two totally unrelated technical problems.

That’s one of my favourites!:D Did the sorely missed Jimmy fly?

Computers and the internet have been the enablers. The incipient drip of regulation upon regulation, instigated by governments over the past 15 years or so, has been gratefully lapped by civil servants, quangos and public and private institutions happy to increase the bureaucracy which runs our lives. Without computers and the internet it would have been nigh on impossible for it to have happened.

Thank you. Would you suggest dipping my toe in with the parody or with the more popular books? It is not a genre I know well but enjoy discovering new subjects and styles. Douglas Adams and Grant Naylor are about as far as I have got, and Red Dwarf was based on the TV series, I believe, not the other way round.