My father had a gregarious yet authoritative style which would have suited the armed services during WWII. Profound deafness prevented this so he joined the Royal Observer Corps, spending time with other disqualificatees (mainly businessmen) on windswept Otley Chevin, north of Bradford, noting aircraft movements and acting as first-line visual defence against aerial invasion.
ROC members had to tell good planes from bad and this spilled over domestically. From five to ten I was sucked in and read the necessary publications more avidly than my father, becoming fairly good at what he did. (I may have passed on the appropriate gene: my elder daughter, having beaten her sword into a ploughshare, could differentiate between a Ford Zephyr and a Ford Zodiac, an extreme distinction which depends mainly on a few strips of chrome trim.)
My skills would not have impressed a similarly indoctrinated young American. To me the most iconic (Hate the word but can’t escape it here) US fighter plane was a Mustang which he would have called a P-51. Moving to bombers my four-engine Liberator would have been his B-24. This numerical nomenclature still prevails among US vintage plane fans. A minor mystery, especially since many of the best-known American planes had good memorable names: Corsair, Lightning and Vengeance (manufactured by the equally memorable company, Vultee.)
ROC members had to tell good planes from bad and this spilled over domestically. From five to ten I was sucked in and read the necessary publications more avidly than my father, becoming fairly good at what he did. (I may have passed on the appropriate gene: my elder daughter, having beaten her sword into a ploughshare, could differentiate between a Ford Zephyr and a Ford Zodiac, an extreme distinction which depends mainly on a few strips of chrome trim.)
My skills would not have impressed a similarly indoctrinated young American. To me the most iconic (Hate the word but can’t escape it here) US fighter plane was a Mustang which he would have called a P-51. Moving to bombers my four-engine Liberator would have been his B-24. This numerical nomenclature still prevails among US vintage plane fans. A minor mystery, especially since many of the best-known American planes had good memorable names: Corsair, Lightning and Vengeance (manufactured by the equally memorable company, Vultee.)
But not all. The Brewster Buffalo was actually a fighter. Funnily enough its tubby fuselage hinted at the eponymous herbivore. Also an uncertain image springs to my mind when someone says Flying Fortress (US: B-17); all those bricks and mortar! This must seem like the Punic Wars to many bloggers. PS: The silhouette pic is a Macchi, an unlikely visitor to Otley Chevin.
