Dudley Henriques wrote in
:

Bertie the Bunyip wrote:

Bertie
Vampire? The side by side version I presume?
Remember that great scene in "Breaking The Sound Barrier" when the
"hero" takes his wife on a trip from England to Egypt in a two seat
Vamp? Beautiful black and white photography in that picture.


I do actually. I love the way they make it look like they did it
first...

Yeah, Yeager was good at that too. I've yet to hear him give George
Welch the credit he has always been due for being the first through
mach 1.......but I have to admit, the Brits made some great movies
about early aviation. The old B&W's were the best I think. The films
they did on Bader and Guy Gibson were superb movies. Leslie Howard
doing Mitchell might have been a bit melodramatic I think :-))

Yes, they did do some good ones. as good as any done elsewhere.





Hope you get to fly it. Nearest thing I can relate to that I've
flown would be the Canadair Tutor. I flew the Snowbirds #10 as a
guest of
the
team at one time. Great little airplane and very easy to fly.
I'm sure you won't have the slightest problem with the Vampire if
they ever get it running.
D


Oh it's often running, then its broken, then it's running, then it's
broken! The lost the canopy on it once and it cost more to replace
than it hadcost to buy the airplane!

I'd say the trick here is to make damn sure it's on the "running" side
of that sin curve the day you get to fly it :-))


Oh they keep it well. It's just the nature of the beast, isn't it?


I have a pic of the snowbirds in Sept Isle Quebec I took in 1979, I
think. They had just flown through Mt St Helen's plume and damaged
their airplanes! I didn;t get up close to them, but I was up in the
tower and the controllers told me their windscreens had been badly
frosted by the incident. I'll have a rumage around for it.

I never knew that, but it would make sense. The grit in the air would
have been quite dense. I once dove a Mustang through a rain shower and
damn near stripped the paint right off it. My crew wanted to kill me
:-)


Yeah, i've takne the paint off in rain lots of times.

Went through hail once. We cracked the outer panes of several screens,
took every single antenna and lamp off the airplane, holed the radome in
many places and trached on fan blade.

The noise of it was unholy. It sounded like a freight train. Crew comms
were impossible. It lasted about a minute, maybe a bit more. Not nice
but we survived it anyway. Ancient old radar wasn't worth the space it
took up.


bertie