Flyby PC

I don't see the three green tags in your screenshot Hauksbee. It looks like it's not getting any input.

Nope. But you might get transferred to cabin crew...

So you weren't wrapped up in duct tape and stuffed in the hold of a plane bound for Madacascar then? Sound excellent fun UKW.

Zulu is a cracking film, if more than a little unfair to Acting Commissar James Langley Dalton VC. He was promoted from the ranks, and came of of retirement to serve as Acting Commissar. He was far more responsible for organising the defence of Rorkes Drift than either Bromhead or Chard, neither of whom were well thought of as officers. There are some who believe that the VC's for Bromhead and Chard had more to with the British army saving face and retaining the confidence of the British public after losing the battle of Isandlwana early that morning. Dalton had to wait a year for his VC. The most stirring bit for me in the film is when the British for up in line, firing volley after volley to drive back the Zulus. I've seen similar drill in Sharpe and similar period films, but somehow its the Zulu film which really gets the blood thumping. The other thing I like about Zulu is the respect it has for the Zulu warriors, both their bravery and their culture. The soundtrack and chanting is awesome. Last thing to say is you can still buy the original BBC recording of Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne from the Royal Welsh Regiments online shop. The Youtube version is faithful to the text, and actually read by Bournes own grandson, in 2009. One other person who wasn't well represented was Pte Hooke VC. In the film he was the spiv type wideboy reluctant to fight. In truth Pte Hooke was a tee total professional soldier, and the film makers had to write a formal letter of apology to Hooke's family to stop them sueing the way he was portrayed in the film. Edit - That's also amazing about so few spear injuries. I'd never heard that before. I did hear the rifles did not come from the British massacre in the morning, but were mostly British Brown Bess muskets coming from various sources.

Having recently found out my Grandfather was in the Dover Patrol in WW1, I was recently browsing for information about the Dover Patrol, and found this instead ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_M2 Though layed down in 1916, these subs were too late for WW1 in 1919, but in the 1920's, they were used for experimentation, and HMS M2 was fitted with an aircraft hangar and small sea plane, a Parnall Peto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parnall_Peto I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the picture, and thought it must be a photoshop effort, but it isn't. I take it the plane was withdrawn into the hangar before diving. The M2 sank with all hands in 1932. All new to me, but thought you'd be interested....

I thought I was quite knowledgeable about WW2, but the more you dig, you just keep learning.... Say for example, if you had to guess, how many aircraft carriers did the US have during WW2? 10? 20? 50? Let's see, there were 4 carriers in the Pacific Fleet which were at sea during Pearl, then there are the ones I could name, ... Yorktown, Hornet and Enterprise at Midway, .... According to Wiki, the US built 151 aircraft carriers of all classes during WW2. I just find it hard to believe, 151 carriers!!!

This is fake of course, but pretty good. It's an F-15 pasted over a Polaris missile launch. [YouYube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1MUo2QbfNM[/YouTube]

I reckon you'll be fine UKW. I think it could be frustrating to start doing the same job for someone else which you'd been doing for yourself, but a complete change should be a whole different world, with the bonus you have the freedom to cherry pick the best bits of your business for old time sake. You've got me thinking now......

Best of luck UKW. I've been self employed for 12 years. I have to admit I don't miss having a boss to answer to, but there are times I really do miss that steady pay cheque at the end of the week, and somebody else having to do all the worrying. I sometimes wonder whether such a period of working for myself would make me a better or a worse employee. I expect I'd be much more sympathetic to the process of actually making the money to pay everybody, but at the same time frustrated that I couldn't do things all my own way if the boss was being an a-hole. I wouldn't say which was better, just self employment is more extreme. The highs are higher which is great, but the lows are lower too. I hope your job works out great, but even if it doesn't, worse case scenario at least you get a chance to re-charge the batteries.

This is interesting too... The Japanese were planning to attack the lock gates of the Panama canal with submarine based aircraft. I'd never heard of this before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400_class_submarine

I missed this last year.... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1311867/Hero-soldier-Kenneth-Woottons-amazing-diary-drawings-WWI-horrors.html

It must be you get so used to vintage vehicles being rare, but when you see 25000 Berliot delivered to the French during the war, you think again. That makes 25000 separate stories of "what happened to that lorry?" and I've heard none of them. And that's just one type of lorry. I don't refurbish vehicles, but these old things would be amazing for their engineering, and judging by the tank on the back of one, could certainly carry a load. You never stop to think how all those 100's of tanks made it to the front.

There are thousands of jobs, but our priorities are all wrong. As a stonemason, I could find shedloads of work to do, on virtually any stone building, and as for walls, there are miles upon miles of stone walls needing repaired. If I only ever fixed stone chimneys, I need never be out of work in Edinburgh. What's missing is the money to pay for it, or rather the will, and priority attached to getting it done. People will happily splash out £50k on a nice car which they'll want rid off when it doesn't look new, but they won't spend £10k to replace a chimney which has done it's job for 200 years without complaint. We've changed from a country which could build such properties to a country which can't even pay for their upkeep. No work? Does that mean we've collectively decided to let these buildings fall down? Seems so. We do have a problem, but telling me there's no work just isn't going to wash. Collectivey, we're spending our money on all the wrong things. Correction, we're spending all of somebody elses money on all the wrong things.

Finding out about my old man prompted me to ask a bit more. Turns out my maternal Grandfather was in the Gordon Highlanders 1922 to 1929, leaving as a colour sergeant. No pics, but I have his pocket watch, presented to him on leaving after 7 years service by the Sergeants Mess. Though never a combatant as such to my knowledge, he joined the Dover Patrol in WW1 at 16, and remained there throughout the war, keeping the channel free of mines etc. There was a story about being bombed or shelled, but we don't really know. He had a really fierce tember in his later years, and that was put down to being bombed during the war, but that might just be a story told to stop his quick temper scaring the kids lol. To be honest I'd never even heard of the Dover Patrol, but there were apparently some 2000 men killed during WW1 as they tried to keep the Channel free from mines and subs. He didn't fight in WW2 either, because he was a joiner to trade, and while I don't think that was a protected trade, he was busy building barracks for troops, and making dummy weapons, trees look like guns etc. Later on, and just before the NHS was set up, he had just set up his own joinery workshop and sawmill as his own business. He had an accident with one of the saws, and cut off 3 and half fingers. He'd no insurance, and that was that. When I was a toddler, I used to suck my finger as a lot of kids do, and when he caught me, he'd jank my finger out my gob then wave these stumps at me saying that's what would happen if I didn't stop sucking my finger. Scared the !**%! out me because my index finger was already shorter than my middle finger. AAAARRGGHH! It's TRUE!!! .....Old git. (I don't actually remember him having a bad temper, but I'd only be 3 or 4 when he died). Looks like that's 2 service records I need to dig out...

Insurance companies say they are going to pay out, then recover the costs, but not from the rioters, from the Police after they failed to maintain law and order on the streets. I reckon that puts the parasitic insurance companies on roughly the same moral plane as the rioters.

It is a different world. It calls to mind the days I used to fly lots of multiplayer missions online. You'd sit there, cranking up the machine and seting up teamspeak etc, then immerse yourself in another world. Kick off was 6 or 7 o'clock, and three or four hours might pass in minutes. To be honest, the mission was a big factor which sucked in your concentration, but with OFF, you can indeed lose yourself in the serenity of the flight alone.

Hey Stump! Long time no see. How is life treating you?

Tora Tora Tora actually means Tiger Tiger Tiger. Also, TTT (1970) was made just a year after MGM's Battle of Britain 1969. TTT also bombed at the Box office. @Hauksbee - Some amazing pics there Hauksbee.

Who needs politics? Judge Dredd would sort it out. The real Judge Dredd though, not Sly Stallone. To be serious, what do these people actually want? If they had a good cause, by rioting in the streets they alienate every neutral or moderate opinion which might have respected their viewpoint and helped them achieve their goals. These aren't political riots, these are anarchist agitators out to cause trouble and destruction. If they have something to say, they should all grow up and say it. You don't change course by drilling a hole in the bottom of the boat.

Hey! I have a tatty cardboard box! It might be the missing one! What an unbelievable coincidence that would be! I'll need to stick it on Ebay and see what I can get for it.

Thing that gets me, is people just climbed on board these machines and flew them. There weren't any flying lessons, because they were the first pioneers and there were no lessons. That must have taken a lot of bottle just to jump on board, crank up the engine and essentially teach yourself to fly. I just cannot imagine people today taking similar risks to pursue a dream. Or to be more accurate, yes I can, but its such a pity that our lives are over regulated with so many rules and regulations covering every aspect of our lives. Build a machine and fly it? These days you even have to think twice about modifying your car just in case you void your insurance. I reckon I'd have had a great time in the 20's and 30's, just touring engineering & blacksmiths shops and seeing creative people making things. Nowadays you see old farm impliments or bizarre contraptions and you're not even sure what they were used for. But once you find out, you'll very often find that tool is spot on for doing the job it was built for. There's no feeling quite like making your own tools or machines and finding out it works or still needs tinkered with. I've never done anything special, but I have broken down some machines and used the parts to build others, and you get a real buzz the first time you try it out. Is it going to work or fall to bits and kill you? Say you adjust a 600mm dia stone saw to take a 900mm blade, or increase the span of a bridge saw - and things like that. You can do that with old machines because they were so solidly built, but it's very risky doing it, not because it's unsafe or dangerous, but because you'd be in such hot water if anybody got hurt using it. I therefore adapt these machines solely for my own use, then have to keep them out of the way. I'm actually very cautious in what I attempt, but even so I still can't let anybody else use them. It almost becomes a hobby in itself. Say one day a tool breaks down, and the replacement part is 2/3rds the price of a new machine, you're better to replace the machine, but then you have a fully operational engine left doing nothing. Therein lies the challenge.... Do you leave it on the shelf for it's pistons to seize up or do you try to find a use for it? I'd never have the guts to build an earoplane and fly it, but I can definitely identify with people working away on 'stuff' to the wee early hours trying to fix things or get them to work better. Doing that with flying machines must have been an amazing challenge and pretty exciting. One of these days, I have a secret desire to build myself a hovercraft. Not a big one, just a one man effort. Mind you, I've fancied doing that for about 20 years now and haven't make a start yet.

Slightly OT, but why did they scramble F 16's, not F-15's? Am a reading too much into it? I know F 16 is a fine aircraft, and might have been closer, but I thought the F15 was the primary interceptor.

Wow! I wonder how that one slipped under the radar? I've never even heard of it, but it looks outstanding. The language is excellent too. I've seen a few programs which interviewed WAAFs in the control rooms, who could hear the pilots comms in real time, and had their vocabularies increased every now and then with some choice new words when occassionaly a pilot would leave his radio on transmit. Need to track down First Light now..... Looks awesome. Is that coloured up BW footage in there too? Looks very well done if it is. Good find Mike!!!

We're both correct Olham, his name is Masaru Tochibayashi. @MikeDixon - missed you 633 squadron comment, but yes, the real Mosquitos flying in 633 squadron are out of this world. It's worth watching just for the footage. The plot just seemed so contrived, when history had already given them a plot far superior to their script.

That's actually more of Tochi's CGI Olham. http://www.k4.dion.ne.jp/~suppon/ My favourite is Merlins, but all his stuff is good. Checkout 'Seabird1' too. It's incredible.