A few weeks earlier at the Abingdon Battle of Britain display, four Beverleys made a ponderous flypast to marks the type’s impending departure from service, If Anon thinks that eight Centauruses (or Centauri?) must have sounded something special, I can assure him that 16 Centaurus engines in loose formation was a sound never to be forgotten.

47/48. Should have got the full 48, but I was too quick and clicked before thinking on one of them. I reckon if there hadn’t been the multiple choices I’d have got about 37 of them.

It’s a Zerbe Sextuplane. Scroll down here for another picture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1910_Los_Angeles_International_Air_Meet_at_Dominguez_Field

Grizzly, I’ve only just spotted that you got there first!

I’ve got a foot in more than one camp here, having been a rocket scientist and missile engineer, then a newspaper sub-editor (and more recently working in mental health, but that’s another story…)
Perhaps the disciplines learned by studying sciences at university stood me in good stead in one of my later incarnations, with an eye for detail and a desire to get things right – preferably at the first attempt.
My guiding thought when writing – or editing other people’s writing – has been to put clarity of expression first, followed by elegance and style. Incorrect spelling does not always detract from either of these aspirations, but nevertheless is something I would expect of others, and something I would correct in other people’s work almost without thinking.
Bear in mind, though, that there is no national academy of English to dictate whether a word is correct or not. Language is a fluent thing and evolves from day to day. Airplane, maneuver, tire, etc betray a writer as probably American, but they’re perfectly legitimate spellings.
Publications across the world have their own in-house guidelines as to preferred spellings, punctuation, etc, and you can guarantee that there will always be some awkward character determined to swim against the tide. It’s a matter of style whether you write gipsy or gypsy, for example – de Havilland used gypsy, for example, but modern usage probably tends towards gipsy, but neither is wrong.
Ever since the 1930s, the hard and fast rule at the Daily Express in London has been to use the American airplane rather than aeroplane, by the way. I’d guess that this was a consequence of the rule from the top of the Canadian-born Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, whose word was law in the Express of yore.
As far as contributions go to forums like this – or fora, if you refer – I’m not going to lose too much sleep if people write about hangers or a camera lense. It’s wrong, it annoys me, and if I was editing for publication I’d change it and suggest the writer checks his/her work before hitting the ‘post’ button. But otherwise life’s too short, and the forum is about historic aviation rather than English grammar and orthography (smarty-pants word for spelling!)

I remember going as a foot passenger to Calais and back on an SRN-6 in the late 1960s. It was a bit like a pebble being skimmed across the water, from inside the pebble. But I’m glad I did it.
I sampled the SRN-4 a few years alter on the same route. A rather more smooth ride, but it was a noisy beast. Very sad to think of them both going to the scrap man, though.

A Dubliner friend of mine reckons he saw a 109 over Dublin in the war, but he’s realistic enough to admit that after 70-odd years his memory may be playing tricks on him. He was about 10 at the time of the 1941 raids on that city.

In an interview on the BBC midday news today, an ‘Expert’ from an aviation magazine was asked why the pilot did not use his ejector seat. The ‘Expert’ replied that because the seats contained explosive devices they were not allowed to be fitted to civilian owned aircraft.

Just in the interests of accurate information, Paragraph 5.8 of the CAA publication CAP632 (which relates to ex-military aircraft in civilian use) reads:

Where ejection seats are an integral part of the aircrew escape system, as
specified in the relevant Pilots Notes, Flight or Aircrew Manuals, it is
recommended that they be fully serviceable for all flights. Approval should
be sought from the CAA (Application and Approvals) at the earliest
opportunity if it is intended to operate with inert ejection seats (or other
escape systems). It is unlikely that the CAA will allow swept-wing aircraft
fitted with ejection seats to be flown unless the equipment is fully
operational.

Obviously the final sentence is the most relevant here. And apologies to anyone of this forum who feels I’m drawing attention to the obvious.
Having said all that, am I right in thinking that an attempted low-altitude ejection in this case would have been a futile exercise?
I presume the regulatory hurdles involved in retrofitting a 1950s aircraft with modern rocket-powered seats would have been just too high, although I’m open to correction.