KevinK

That reminds me perfectly of the happy days when I used to fly aerobatics on a Chipmunk. I swear the dH Gipsy dumps more oil than a rotary. On another matter of 'aircraft getting dirty', my Dad used to fly Beverleys to El Adem in the early '60s. After a week's intensive exercises on up-country desert strips, the aircraft were cleaned at Abingdon on their return. They were weighed before and after cleaning, and it wasn't unusual to get 2000 lb of dirt off the aircraft.

Although I haven't met Musk, I have worked with Space-X on a launch vehicle project. One 'secret' to their success is that they have a very flat management structure, with virtually none of the rules, procedures and general 'faff' of traditional aerospace companies. This allows his organization very rapid decision-making, quick product changes and lowers organizational costs and project timescale dramatically. On the other hand, my present - traditional - company is a poster child for pointless bureaucracy, displacement activity and endless, functionless management drones: for essentially similar products, Space-X can be up to an order of magnitude cheaper. Once upon a time, the aerospace industry was not unlike Space-X is today, but the intervening decades since the Apollo era have led to an inward-looking, government-dependent and timid management in most of today's companies. All Elon has really done - and I don't mean this in any way to be negative - is to 'go back to basics'. Darwinian forces are at work here. The 'new space' companies in the launch vehicle area, Space-X, Blue Origin, will drive the others completely out of business. ULA will be gone within three years or so - people are leaving in droves as they see the writing on the wall, leading to a self-perpetuating decline. Boeing and LM will continue of course, they just won't make launchers. Some others will adapt and survive, but there's a big shakeout underway.

Well, I'll go with my last year's confident prediction of a 1/24th Beverley, but I would probably settle for 1/48th if I really, really had to. One year I'll be right - probably 2050.

And since, as we know, Boeing did the Borg thing and assimilated North American (Rockwell) and (McDonnell) Douglas, they probably would claim it. One small correction - yes, all the big engines (F-1, J-2) were by Rocketdyne but TRW, Aerojet, Bell and Marquardt did the various spacecraft engines.

It is amazing and and humbling that I found some - indirect - personal connections with two of the mentioned colour films. When I lived in New Orleans, I worked at a Martin / NASA plant at Michoud. On the engineering staff there were TWO former Lancaster tail gunners, one British and one Canadian. When "Night Bombers" was broadcast on PBS sometime in the 1980's, I recorded it and showed it to them. One of them had been at Hemswell and recognized himself in a debriefing scene. He said that Gp/Capt Cozens always seemed to have a movie camera in hand but the aircrew didn't pay much attention and of course, few ever saw the outcome. It is a very, very sobering film, because it's the real thing. The second occasion was a few years later, back in UK, when "Britain at War in Colour" was broadcast. In one of the title sequences, and shown in a slightly longer sequence in the program itself, several Spitfire IXs pull up past the camera aircraft one after another. The first are 73 Sqn aircraft and then a 253 Sqn Spit - "SW" codes - appears; a later shot in the same sequence shows a flight of Spits in the distance with red spinners and "SW" codes - "A" Flight of 253 Sqn. The significance of this is that I was watching this with my Dad, who was a pilot with 253, "A" Flight in Italy & Yugoslavia 1944-46. The film was shot in the summer of 1945 by David Green who was a pilot on 73 Sqn, in 281 Wing with 253. The thing is, Dad had very few photos from his wartime service, and never in my wildest dreams did I think that there would be colour film, with - in all probability - him flying! Kevin

Enforcing trade agreements? Seriously, I think it may be because the NOAA, National Weather Service, etc come under the Dept of Commerce so that weather research would be my real guess - but I prefer the first one! Kevin

Ah - a rookie mistake! The photo clearly shows blue chocks and, as everyone knows, these didn't come in until 1946.

There was a gradual change from about 1966/7 (or so, not sure of the exact year) right across the RAF from the earlier blue flying suits to green. The reason/story given at the time came from Transport Command: if an aircraft operating near the lines was on the ground delivering troops, any enemy sniper could figure out that if there were several dozen in Army green, but only two or three in blue, if he shot those he shot the crew and the aircraft wasn't leaving. In any case, it would help in an escape/evasion case in NW Europe to be in green rather than blue, so this change took place across the RAF, but it took years, as flying suits would be replaced as needed, unless, of course a particular C.O. wanted more uniformity. Kevin

When I used to fly aerobatics on a Chipmunk from Farnborough, we used to operate about 10 miles West of the aerodrome, to remain clear of as much traffic as possible. Farnborough Radar used to keep an eye out for nearby traffic: Odiham's Chinooks, other light aircraft, bizjets, etc and I generally got quite good at spotting aircraft from unusual attitudes, but as you say, sometimes you just don't see them. The ones that used to scare me were the sailplanes from Lasham: those things are nearly invisible head-or tail-on and I would usually only see them if they banked in the sunlight. Kevin

I finished mine back in 1964/5 both ways: I built it as a floatplane and then, when the float struts were broken in the inevitable 'play' phase, replaced the floats with the spatted wheels. Probably my first 'conversion' & I still have it. Kevin

Thank you, Bedders. However, now I read it again, I'm sounding like Uncle Albert Trotter: "... during the War..."

Just as an interesting data point: when I was on the Space Shuttle program, we changed the External Tank finish after the first two flights, from a white Titanium Dioxide paint finish to the bare foam. The removal (well, non-application) of the paint saved 600 lb in total vehicle mass.

Agreed, it is. I sat in the cockpit of the S.6 in Southampton some years ago - there really isn't much more in there, and in any case, if there were, you couldn't see it from the outside if the pilot were in place. Once the hinged windscreen is down, there's little more than a hole in the fuselage just big enough for the pilot's head. Kevin

I would just like to put in a word of praise for Mikro-Mir's customer service. I found a small transparency missing from one of my Beverley kits. I e-mailed Mikro-Mir on 5th June, got a response on the 11th that the part was sent, and it was in my mailbox today: the complete sprue, bubble-wrapped and in a small double-walled card box. Undoubtedly the best customer service I've had from a kit manufacturer in recent years.

Eagle Spitfire, 1/96th scale, made in September 1960 on board a Bristol Britannia of BUA, en-route from Singapore to Stansted.