If the airline demand had really been there, then we would have seen STOL being adopted on a large scale. The 54-seat Dash 7 probably came nearest to true STOL, but production ended 19 years ago with just over 100 built.
Wherever you site an airport, be it somewhere like London City or Liverpool (five minutes from my house), it’s going to be in the wrong place for many if not most people. The samed applies to the main line railway stations.
I recall all sorts of wierd and wonderful VTOL (not STOL) offerings from Hawker Siddeley in the 1970s which were never the same again after the oil crisis, and the Wilson government of the day did the aircraft industry a (rare) favour by pulling the plug on them, IMHO.

William

Depends on how much editing you want to do. The image organising programmes discussed in an earlier thread nearly all have some basic editing function, but if you want to go further then GIMP that RobAnt has suggested is one of the best free ones around.
I’ve had http://www.photofiltre.com suggested to me s a pretty good one too, but I’ve got no first-hand experience to go on.
A full-feature image programme like Photoshop CS2, which I have access to, can be pretty daunting to a home user, to say nothing of expensive! However, I feel very comfortable with Photoshop Elements, which is £69 in its latest version, and you can download a free trial from the Adobe website to have a play around with.
Try looking for Photoshop Elements in eBay and there seem to to be plenty of legitimate copies available for considerably less than the official price. I’d go for any version from Elements 3 onwards, as these have the incredibly useful spot healing tool for getting rid of blemishes from, particularly, scans.

William

When Ezer Weizman used his Spitfire as a personal hack in the Six Day War in 1967, was the Spitfire equipped for combat?
Obviously it never happened, but Spitfire vs MiG-21 would have been, er, interesting. Certainly if it had happened, Weizman was the kind of guy who’d have gone down fighting to the end.

William

My last amendment crossed with John’s posting. I reckon he’s cracked it.

http://www.vinar.cz/mitte/s31.htm

William

Look closely at the roundel under the wing of the biplane, and you can see that the outer ring appears darkest. As nearly all film then had blue-sensitive orthochromatic emulsions which endered reds un-naturally dark, this suggests to me that it is probably French as well as the monoplane.
Plenty of things it almost looks like. It did cross my mind for a moment it might be a Gloster Gamecock, but see above. Besides, the exhaust stubs and the fin and rudder outline are wrong for this.
It’s not a late model Bleriot/SPAD as these had single interplane struts. Hmmm….puzzled.

William

Did any names for the bird ever surface?

There was a thread on this some time last year. Eagle seemed to have been the most likely, as the RAF was quite fond of birds of prey for naming its fast jets at the time.
The ordered-then-cancelled F-111s were pencilled in as Merlins, apparently, and the aborted supersonic VTOL P1154 would have been the Harrier.
The Harrier name, obviously, was reallocated to the P1127 (RAF), and the Merlin name is now attached to a helicopter…

William

Good job Flares didn’t come in til the 70’s!! 😀

Even a more modern bike and flares don’t mix. On a 1970s BMW flat twin it was possible to get a trouser leg hooked over the carburetter top preventing a foot from touching the ground, resulting in the bike toppling over.
Don’t ask me how I know this….:D

William

….. Did any other aero manufacturers produce other automotive thingy wotsits

Plenty on the engines side…Rolls-Royce, BMW and Daimler-Benz to name but some.
Not so sure about airframes. I know Austin built a few fighters in the Great war, and Fiat means as much in aviation as it does on the road. Plus, of course, the many British motor makers like Rootes Group who turned themselves into plane makers in the Second World war – think of all those Speke-built Blenheims and Halifaxes.
The early French aviator Gabriel Voisin was as much a car man as a planes man. He was just about the last survivor of the really early days of powered flying (ie pre-1908) and in the 1970s he was asked whether he would rather be driving one of his cars or a modern one. He reply was along the lines of ‘don’t be silly – a Renault 5 is better than anything I ever made.’
I’m sure I’ve left a few obvious names out, but you get the general idea.

William