PLANE SPEAKING

For various reasons – some of them even work-related – the topic of aircraft seems to have been flying around (Ho, ho!) the office recently. It may be because one of m’colls went off to an airshow and got all “enthusiastic” about the subject, or it may be because they’ve become very interested in the gentle art of model-kit building, or it may even be because some research had to be done into vintage aircraft in relation to a possible theme for a project, but, for whatever reason it might have been, we’ve been talking a lot about aircraft, and most specifically vintage aircraft seems to be the bit that we’re currently finding most exciting to discuss.

Interestingly, as these things always seem to you’ll no doubt have realised if you’ve been here before, this has stirred up many memories from my own childhood as I was once, in a very understated way, a bit of a plane spotter myself. I don’t mean that I stood outside with my binoculars and my notebooks and took down numbers or anything like that (although if I’d had any like-minded chums, I’m sure that would have only been a heartbeat away from happening), but I was an “enthusiast” of the type that liked to read about the things and draw them and look up at the sky and identify them, as well as contributing (briefly) to “SQUAWK”, the magazine produced by the school aircraft spotters club, (and I’m not generally as a rule someone who joins anything…).

Since our little chats have been filling the gaps between the work at the office, I’ve been trawling the dusty shelves and digging out my old aircraft identification books as well as the exercise book containing the school project I did when I was about nine and which, almost unbelievably, I still had sitting upon one of the bookshelves.

You can tell how old I am, by the way, when I can recall regular Vickers Viscount and Vanguard turboprop services approaching Ringway, and I’m happy to tell people about the colourful delights of the various “Court Line” jets flying in with their two-tone groovy coloured fleet and its shiny silver letters.

Despite all the talk of Spitfires, Seafires, Hurricanes, Lancasters and Wellingtons which we are currently bandying about in reference to the kit-building world (where the attention to detail really is truly astonishing and which takes far, far more effort than I would ever have been prepared to put in), my own first aeronautical loves were the passenger planes which I used to build quite poorly from kits when I was a ham-fisted bungler of a model-maker as a boy. I am reminded of friends’ bedrooms with fleets of aircraft hanging on strings from the ceilings, which also reminds me of the Aerospace museum in Seattle where full-sized aircraft were hanging from their ceiling in a very similar way...

I mean I used to build the warplanes too, of course. Interestingly enough, although I can’t quite track it down at the moment, I have a photo of a Hawker Hurricane somewhere (although I don’t have a clue exactly where) that was amongst my grandfather’s papers when he died. Despite not being available for active duty due to his appalling eyesight, his plumbing skills were apparently requisitioned to help build Hurricanes I was once told, which might explain the petrol-driven “control line” one I got for my birthday when I was about eight. It flew for one glorious afternoon, I seem to remember, before nose-diving into a field and snapping off its machine guns, before being parked in its box on a shelf in my bedroom and making the place faintly whiff of fuel for a number of years before doing one of those mysterious “vanishing tricks” that many of our childhood toys seem to.

Perhaps those are both subjects that we’ll be returning to on another day…?

Anyway, when it came to model-making, you went with whatever kits took your fancy at the newsagents in those days, but it was the 737s and the Tridents that I most liked building, but my real favourites, the aircraft I consider to be true works of art and things of beauty were those passenger planes from between the two World Wars, those silver bi-planes seemingly held together with string and canvas which used to take a leisurely week or so to travel to South Africa, India and even Australia as the British Empire  began to fade, in which, for about a year or more’s salary for the ordinary worker, you could be served Silver Service dinners as your plane flew over the pyramids.

Aircraft like the Handley Page 42 and, to a lesser extent, the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy truly are things of beauty to me, perhaps because they just look like train carriages with wings and perhaps prove that if you just put the right kind of wings on something, pretty much anything can fly. Even so, I’d still have been far, far too terrified to ever get inside one of the things, but they speak so clearly to me of that long-lost era of the dawn of passenger air travel… I had to look the names of the actual aircraft up, of course, because such specific details had long been buried in my brain by the mundanity of grown-upedness. I remembered the type of aircraft from my own “Brooke Bond” tea card collection, something silver with a load of propellors attached to a huge wing above the passenger cabin, but the name of the thing had escaped me. However, finally dredging the name “Imperial Airways” from the slurry at the back of my mind soon put me back on track, and I was able to find these fabulous pictures to back up my childhood memories.

Of course the technological miracle of the fact that human beings went from not being able to achieve powered flight at alt to supersonic jet travel and being able to put a man on the moon within the span of one human lifetime is a topic I’ve touched upon before, but it doesn’t do any harm to remind ourselves of it again every once in a while.