If it’s allowed to share the costs between pilot and passenger in a Cessna 152, then it’s very likely also allowable for a Spitfire. There is no blanket ban on Spitfires carrying passengers as such, as many photos in the airshow forum will show.

I suspect the crucial point is how pilot and passenger are “mated”, and how often, i.e. are we talking about the odd friend/acquaintance a couple of times per year, or are 100 “friends” taken for a shared-cost ride every year after responding to an add in a magazine?

The latter points towards a commercially oriented operation, especially if there is any form of advertisements (Internet etc.) for “friends”.

I don’t know the CAA’s way of thinking in this respect, but interpretations seem to differ wildly in Europe.

In Denmark, any indication towards the latter of the examples I mentioned above will immediately result in the pilot’s licence being revoked and a court case with a hefty punishment for attempted illegal commercial operations.

In Germany, on the other hand, it is entirely legal (with advertisements and the lot) as long as no profit is made.

Hence, the friendly (e.g.) Harvard owner selling joyrides at a small Flugtag in Germany could very well just have bought the aircraft and (apart from conversion training) have done only 3 take-offs and landings in the last 90 days (only legal requirement for taking passengers) before selling rides, and is not necessarily the multi-thousand hour experienced pilot his operation/aircraft might suggest. Makes you think, and if it doesn’t, then it should.

Not that I have any qualms about any Spitfire operator in the UK, but there is a reason for the requirement for an AOC and a correspondingly qualified pilot, especially when it comes to heavy and complex aircraft.

Personally, I would be very wary of whom I fly with in a PPL-type aircraft, would never buy of one the joyrides I mentioned above and have in fact not flown as a passenger in a PPL-type aircraft since I acquired my licence myself many years ago and learned what could all go wrong!

I guess it’s a bit of an exagerration to link any anti-German reaction with “perpetuation of the hatred of WW2”.

I wish it were, but it isn’t. Believe me. There are many other examples. Soccer may be an additional motivation, but the root cause is the one I mentioned above.

… would you mind pointing me in the direction of sources which accurately represent German public opinion on the activities of the RAF and USAAF during World War Two please?

I’m afraid I can’t off the top of my head. In any case, concerning the bombing as such, I’m sure that opinion would perhaps understandably be negative. Who likes having bombs dropped on their heads anyway.

However, this is not the issue at present and is not the reason why I posted in this thread in the first place.

The subject of this thread, as I understand it, is the alleged resistance of some people in Dresden towards the erection of a Bomber Command memorial in London, rather than the rights and wrongs of who bombed whom and when. The chances of contributors to this thread ascertaining undisputably something many professional historians have been disagreeing on for many years are slim, to say the least.

As regards the Dresden resistance, what you must understand is that there is a very wide-spread and common tendency in Germany for individuals and minorities to protest against anything on the alleged behalf of the immediate public, be that airfields, motorways, railway stations, Google Street View, etc. etc. Their messages are grasped by journalists hungry for a sensationalist story (which Bild always is) and presented as majority views, even though this is not necessarily the case. I strongly suspect that this is what happened here. I have no connection to Dresden whatsoever, but I’m quite sure that the majority of people there (by nature born mostly after WW2) have more pressing problems on their minds, such as unemployment rates and decay of the social system in general (health care, for example), and couldn’t care less about a proposed memorial somewhere completely different.

My concern is the perpetuation of the hatred of WW2 and passing this on to generations essentially completely unaffected by these events. Suggesting e.g. that a German mayoress should be dropped from the BBMF Lancaster , and drawing parallels to WW2 for latter-day situations and events very often does exactly this.

The following two examples illustrate that this perpetuation is alive and well:

Some years ago a young German school girl in an international school in the Netherlands was attacked by a group of Dutch boys and had a part of her finger cut off. The boys’ motivation was “that she was German”.

Some years ago, my brother (from Denmark) took his family to see where we had been on holiday as children with out grandmother in Gillingham (Kent). Speaking Danish among themselves, they were approached by a group teenagers asking them were they were from. Answering “Denmark”, they were told that they should consider themselves lucky, because if they had been German they “would have had the sh*t knocked out of them”.

Prejudice and aggression like this only happens because it is brought forward from one generation to the other and it has to be stopped, if we want to move forward from events happening more than 65 years, get on with life and avoid situations such as what happened in ex-Yugoslavia.

Many people could do a positive effort in this respect instead of painstakingly living in a past of which they were never directly part of anyway.

It’s the comments in the first three posts rather than the memorial as such which bother me.

According to a press release appearing in Danish newspapers, SAS is short of crew for smaller aircraft and the A340 will therefore occasionally be used on some European routes for a limited period time (with London being one of the destinations mentioned).

Regarding the Danish F-100’s:

If I recall correctly, they had Bullpup and possibly also Sidewinder missiles. They were also fairly soon modified to take Martin-Baker ejection seats

Most of them were retired in late 1981. All surviving F-100D’s (which were USAF property) were transferred to the Turkish Air Force during 1981/1982, so I should have thought that they were active beyond 1982 in Turkey.

Pics of Danish F-100’s here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfblume/sets/72157623186814480/

List of all Danish F-100’s here:

http://www.milfly.dk/pdf/f100.pdf

Beautiful!

Does it still have the Packard V12 engines and are they in working order? Is it a “static” restoration or is it sailing as well?