I spend most of my time on my own forum these days, The Wings Over New Zealand Forum, and only pop in here for short bursts nowadays.

Grizzly, I have never heard of RNZAF Corsairs at Darwin or anywhere else in Australia, I’d really be interested in seeing that photo. They’re not Royal Navy British Pacific Fleet Corsairs, are they?

Yes this aircraft formed part of the flypast over Edgar Kain’s funeral party.

This is perhaps one of the most historic Hurricanes around. It flew in the Battle of France, Battle of Britain, with No. 71 (Eagle) Squadron and in the Battle of Murmansk.

It is worth reminding people that P3351 is a big part of the reason why so many other Hurricanes are flying in Britain now, because Sir Tim Wallis set up in partnership with Tony Ditheridge – formerly of AJD Engineering – in order to restore P3351. The partnership went on to become Hawker Restorations, which has since restored several more to flight. This kiwi connection with Hawker Restorations seems to have been lost on many as time has gone by.

I have read so often that Eric Brown is a wonderful speaker. Are there any recordings or podcasts available on the web where I can download and hear some of his talks at all please?

I am surprised it was not already trademarked by Wingnut Films or whichever studio is backing the movie.

A couple of stories. The RNZAF ace Jim Sheddan told me that one of the times he crashed (he had a few) was when he and his CO were attacking a V-1. The CO’s ejected shells were injested into Jim’s Tempest’s intake, stopping his engine dead, he said. So that is one aircraft destroyed air to air by shells!

I know another pilot who was air testing a Wellington and in cloud he flew into a balloon cable. He said that the weather was so bad the balloon section assumed no-one would be mad enough to be flying, so they let their balloons up much higher than normal into the thick cloud to stretch the cables (something they had to do periodically, he was told). He was forced to bale out, and came down on mudflats of an estuary, where he promptly found he sank into the mud up to his hips. Lucily somone on shore had seen him come down and rushed out with snow-shoes on and a sled, picked him up on the sled and rushed back to shore as fast as he could as the tide was whipping in there. George was most grateful as the tide was rapid and within some minutes where he’d been stuck was well under water and he’d have drowned if not for this chap who was well prepared for mud flat travel.