A tentative take-off

Neither Plutarch nor I could easily remember or pronounce A Stall Recovered the title of my second novel (now finished) so I junked it. Before I embark on the drudgery of sending the MS to agents I’ve been playing with a new title – modified biblical – and here it is on a draft dust jacket.

QUICK DESCENT No hymn starts with such splendour as:

Hark the herald angels sing
Glory to the new-born king;
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled: etc, etc

and then deteriorates into:

Late in time behold him come
(Backward ran the sentences…)
Offspring of the Virgin’s womb;
(A Jack-in-the-box?)
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
(Backward into the butcher’s shop)
Hail the incarnate deity
(More flesh than we need)
Pleased as man with man to dwell,
(Tempted to say “Pleased as Punch…”)

Plus this shocker in the third and final verse:

Risen with healing in his wings.
(Is it bread, or a chicken pie?)

Alas for C. Wesley, author of the above. In my hymn-book the next hymn is Christina Rossetti’s In The Bleak Mid-winter. Nuff said.

BB returns WW to its roots

To fly in a light plane along a coastline that evokes WS’s “swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean”. To do it in France. To do it in good company. Our pilot Louis Kervoaze, who mediated terrestrial and celestial regions on our behalf, was our secular priest. I couldn’t fail to ask questions.

LK solo-ed after fifteen hours. Jana, hero of A Stall Recovered, did it in nine but she’s imaginary. A quick solo doesn’t guarantee a good pilot and LK remembered a youth who seemed ready after five hours. “But he never came back,” LK added. My rotten French turned this into a horror story whereas LK implied “for further lessons”. Fear was the reason.

Good pilots become old good pilots by remaining aware. As LK taxied from the hanger to the runway his head moved continuously, a series of tiny, jerky sweeps repetitively covering the whole of his visible world. The trick is never to be satisfied by not finding a menace or a discrepancy.

Immediately in front of me was the GPS display, quite unlike the Disneyish toy I use in my car. Serious kit with a flashing capital M. Standing for? Message, LK said, but he’d checked it ages ago.

As the Cessna 172 took off (A delightful French word: décoller, to unstick) the aerodynamic exterior needed changing from one which gave added lift to one which encouraged drag-free forward flight. A quick touch on a wheel labelled Flaps.

We approached the landing at right-angles to the end of the runway. LK took us in on a smooth descending turn with the wheels finally straddling the dotted line down the centre of the tarmac. I said Parfait. but it sounded cheap. What I meant was beautiful.

Cursed flight ends with great lunch

Finally! I watched Louis Kervoaze crank the Cessna’s yoke anti-clockwise against a port side crosswind and we were airborne in about ten metres flat for a 45-minute round trip between Lannion and Paimpol along the north Brittany coast. On the back seat sat Mrs BB and Lucy (with her ever-clicking Lumix).

Disappointment had seemed inevitable. I was misinformed by a tourist office and an aero-club, got the air strip muddled and had been threatened by strong winds that were whisking super-tankers out of the Channel and dropping them into the Place de la Concorde. On that very morning Lucy’s Tom came down with the lurgi and the phrase Le vol maudit (Cursed flight) was born.

But here we were inspecting the mussel beds from 1000 feet (yes, French aviators do use imperial terms), overflying an island acquired by a supermarket magnate and appreciating tide-out contours undetectable at sea level. The landing was a special treat: a deliberate stall whereby the plane in effect drops the last few metres on to the runway to the muted blare of the stall horn. I couldn’t remember the exact word to describe this experience other than it started with an e. Useful having Lucy around; she knew I’d undergone an epiphany.

Tom had recovered thank goodness and we met up with him for lunch at one their favourite fish restaurants in Erquy. Humdrum stuff like coquilles St Jacques, half a dozen oysters and a piquant white number from Gascony – almost a canteen meal you might say. Afterwards we were ushered into the presence of the famous Mol who I believe conferred her blessing. Oh, I should add: we did talk a bit.

Below: Lucy, Louis, Mrs BB with Cessna 172.

Where flying's for the birds

In Britain, a private flight involves calling a charter specialist and a foolish amount of money. In New Zealand you just turn up with the aforesaid deep pockets. In France it’s another matter.

Followers of Works Well may remember last year’s illness and surgery prevented various BB celebrations and these merged into 2011 plans for a short stay in Brittany plus a flight along that region’s wonderfully ragged coastline. The Internet revealed inexpensive options, all illusory. Helicopters? Forget it. Bargains turned gold-plated at FOUR TIMES the cost of hiring Richard Hammond’s chopper in Britain, posted two years ago.

Fixed wings come cheap under baptême à l’air (introductory flight) schemes, but note “introductory”. These are for people considering becoming a pilot. Not only is the joystick – a yoke these days – available for the passenger, using it is mandatory. Our aim was gentle sight-seeing, not me sweating cobs trying to keep the altimeter at 2000 feet with Mrs BB suffering conniption fits to the rear.

The eventual solution was a cadeau (gift) flight in early September. Thirty minutes there and back in the direction of Cap Fréhel from St Brieuc aerodrome. I’d have preferred an hour but I’m too old to learn to fly. Will post but light aircraft flights definitely come under: Man Proposes, God Disposes. The weather may win.

The plane is a Robin (see pic) which may amuse those in the know.

NOVEL There’s an irony to the above since Stall Averted (new title) is about the joys of flying in south-west France. Though I say it myself, progress has been phenomenal. By rising two-and-a-half hours earlier for several weeks I shall, when this post is done, resume at 99,621 words. Jana is now loveable and is in the process of being loved.

Bondens in action

GRANDCHILD ONE Research for TLP involves trawling Arizona education, veterinarian practices, SW France geography and the way people fall in love. All the usual boring BB stuff. Plus, continuously, flying - from radio procedure, to cruising speeds, to ADF (automatic direction finding). Recently I bought Microsoft Flight Simulator X, serious software which teaches plane handling. Alas it’s hard to stop writing and allocate time to this demanding package.

Grandson Ian learns far more quickly, due to a 49-year age disparity and because he has eyes in the back of his head. I watch and take notes. Yesterday he landed a float plane and taxied to a pontoon where his passenger stood. Fine, but how do you bring something that floats to a halt? We never found out and the passenger was twice terrified out of his life.

GRANDCHILDREN TWO AND THREE This photo is positively dynastic. On the left is Ysabelle (aged 21), on the right Zach (5), sister and brother. She is reading to him a Richard Scarry Mrs BB read to her nearly two decades ago. But stay! She invites him to read the next chapter which he does, stumbling only over “barnacle” and mistaking “barge” for “bridge”. Ysabelle is presently finishing a dissertation on US foreign policy before leaving Leicester U, Zach is in the third term of his first year at primary school.

Zach calls Mrs BB Little Grannie and me Big Grandad. His paternal grandparents are Nanna and Grandad Who Looks After Nanna.

THE LOVE PROBLEM 58,408 words. Jana is on the brink; the affair will wreck her.

Meet you in the garage, Dr Freud

Even by my deplorable standards this is a terrible photo with its uncontained and out-of-focus subject. I should say this small parts bin-rack is attached to the garage wall and the garage is full of car so photography was fraught. But the result is not offered for its aesthetics. It’s evidence in an act of psycho-self-analysis.

The plastic bins contain screws of differing size, panel pins, washers, tin tacks, etc, an attempt to systematise DIY Chez Bonden. But note the Elastoplast labels attached any-old-how, note the dust, note the unnecessary packaging stuffed into the bins, note the air of desuetude.

The photo is truthfully symbolic. It captures both the commendable impulse towards efficiency and the slipshod methods that undermine the impulse. The rack is the work of someone long on theory and short on practice. One who subscribes heavily to the principle: if a job’s worth doing, let’s half do it. My father who, to my knowledge, never knocked in a single nail would approve. I’d invoke Lord Finchley if I didn’t think he’s over-invoked on the Internet. Presently I am up in my loft reading Barry Bucknell's autobiography.

THE LOVE PROBLEM 29,106 words. In Chapter 6 (unfinished) Jana provides a flying lesson for a wealthy, somewhat unlikeable young man who’s slow at learning. It’s common knowledge that Barrett Bonden is of the male gender yet future readers, if any, may wonder. From time to time BB is Jana, port wine stain and all. I had relished spotlighting her advantages during this flying lesson but my fingers were guided elsewhere. Through Jana’s sympathetic teaching the man improves, making the larger point: Jana is professional and I’ve no business practising vengeance on the sort of men I can’t stand

Do you have the moxie to sit here?

Novels can improve on nature. My hero, Jana, is more civilised, more sympathetic and speaks better French than me. Since I am spending a year in her company I wouldn’t have it any other way. But she’s superior elsewhere: she flies planes.

Piloting requires technical skills. On the Cessna 172 dashboard about twenty sources of information must be checked and – more demandingly - interpreted. Some are more important and may be ignored only for a minute. As I construct take-offs, flights and landings I imagine I could manage this.

It’s the other side I worry about. Unlike cars and boats planes operate in three dimensions but it would be fatal to imagine this as simply a sequence of two-dimensional equivalents of roads and waterways. To gain height you climb; climb inadvisedly and you stall (ie, lose normal control of the plane); fail to correct a stall and you spin; spin… well, you can guess.

Ironically, in the perfect landing you flirt with the stall. You approach the runway slowly and it’s dangerous to fly slowly. The exterior of the plane is “dirty” with flaps and undercarriage down; the controls are less responsive. At the right moment you cut the power and the plane stalls into touchdown.

I might even manage this. But have I the capacity to be observant – all the time? This is what distinguishes flying from driving a car. Remember those lapses on the motorway? They mustn’t happen in the air. There are routines that help but do I have the temperament? Happily my age makes the question irrelevant.

A legitimate use for book margins?

Lucy’s post about writing in printed books brings longish comments. Alas, mine was devoted to psycho-analysing her writing style, forgetting the gravamen (I like taking that word out of the shed every so often and walking it round the lawn) of her original observation. The consensus seemed to be against the practice and I would agree.

With one exception. My French lessons consist of preparing a book passage for precise oral translation “in class”. Once read the book has little re-sale value for the reasons shown above. (Click to zoom, if you're interested.) This book is the experimental L’emploi du Temps by Michel Butor. Experimental? You may well ask.

THE LOVE PROBLEM Chs. One and Two 11,328 words, Ch. Three 1709 words. An unexpected sub-theme emerges. Jana, my American pilot heroine, flies planes in France and speaks better French than me. In doing so, she reflects on French vs English, often jokily. This is so fruitful I will have to hold it in check.

Sometimes it's wichtig not Ooh, la la

Lucy’s just off a Rilke high and reads Montaigne, Plutarch reads Montaigne and quotes Aurelius and Avus urges Wang Shih Chi. I am reading Elmore Leonard’s Pronto. It features Ezra Pound (jokily), plotting and dialogue are worth plagiarizing, but it’s a comic thriller (an under-subscribed genre) and it’s fun.

I have my moments. Peter Watson’s The German Genius (964 pp, £30, so you’ve got to be serious) was written almost in despair. A prophet of German culture Watson believes that for most Brits Germany is The Third Reich and nothing else. He compensates with this history of German ideas over the past 250 years legitimately sub-titled Europe’s Third Renaissance.

Ideas aren’t just philosophy they’re religion, science, painting, music, education, plays, movies, poetry, and – yes, I fear – war. Thus the cascade: Goethe, Marx, Leibniz, Clausewitz, Heidegger, Wagner, Brecht, Beethoven, Beuys, Nietsche, Biedermann, Boltzmann, Bonhoeffer, Büchner, Kant, Spengler, Dürrenmatt, Engels, Feuchtwanger, Freud, Grass, Hegel, Herzog, Kraft-Ebing, Lang, Mann…plus the companies AEG, BASF, Benz… plus… well you get the idea. Being pro-German isn’t as sexy as being pro-French but it is high protein.

CRISPER I’m surprised about this apfel strudel’s asymmetry; Mrs BB likes to go for decorative touches but here she was discouraged. She believes the filo pastry remained in the freezer too long and “dried out”. It’s crisper than usual but perfectly edible. Any ideas?

THE LOVE PROBLEM Chs 1 – 2, 11,340 words, February 15 2011. Fun for the author doesn’t always mean fun for the reader. But I’m enjoying truffling – eg, How do you switch off the engine of a Cessna 172R? Jana’s tougher than Clare (of Gorgon Times) but we meet at the altar of her love for flying.

Heads can ache as well as backs

Apart from two years in the fifties, I worked on newspapers and consumer/business/technical magazines from 1951 until 1995. When in 1959 I wrote to Mrs BB’s father to ask for her hand (the tradition then) he agreed, even though he was never sure journalism was a real job. He was a chef, working 6½ days a week.

My two-year blip involved RAF national service. After trawling my psyche the RAF decided I was capable of understanding airborne radio equipment. Basic training (Learning to kill with a bayonet. Avoiding venereal disease. etc) added to technical training took almost a year after which I repaired VHF transmitters/receivers in a large non-air-conditioned shed in Singapore. However incurable athlete’s foot took over and after very primitive and futile treatment I ended up near Doncaster modifying radar antennae used on Lancaster bombers (see pic).

None of which is terribly interesting except to prove that in a mainly sedentary professional life I have also worked manually. Received wisdom says manual work is harder than sitting-down work. I didn’t find this so. Admittedly I wasn’t digging holes or assembling Ford Anglias but I used screwdrivers, soldering irons, Avometers, and some delicacy.

The repair work was complex and I needed to study a large circuit diagram. I found it fairly entertaining but, more particularly, it was a finite world. By comparison a thousand-word article on fork-truck masts, initially at least, presents a huge range of options. An inverted pyramid of work, some of which isn’t entirely enjoyable.

No, I’m not saying I’d rather have been a navvy. Hard work’s where you find it, although most sophists work at desks.

Monsieur, I wish to fly

To make up for our uncelebrated fiftieth on October 1 we will rediscover Brittany early next year and, in particular, hire a plane to view its wild and raggedy coast. I’m looking forward to the preparations.

As a former house owner in France I met much fixed opinion there. If not downright stubbornness. The counter-man at Big Mat building materials said he not only couldn’t supply decorative gravel I needed for my garden paths but that such gravel “didn’t exist in France”. He was wrong. At Monsieur Bricolage, the DIY chain, I was told that if I wanted to box in my bath I must (note that - must) encase it in faience (tiling). He too was wrong.

Plane hire sounds like a fruitful area for such blind insistence. Fixed wing vs. helicopter. Aviation law and the sea. Seating capacity. Facilities for photography. But if it can be done I’ll do it. The key is my French: it’s not good enough for natives to be certain I’m being intentionally rude.

LONG TIME NO SEE Eventually the MS of Gorgon Times will be despatched to my agent. I have been drafting the first paragraph of the covering letter:

“I doubt you remember that in 1975 I submitted a novel, BREAKING OUT, written while I was working in the USA. What may make this distant and humdrum event slightly more memorable is that you travelled to Farringdon where I worked as an IPC journalist and gave me lunch. The novel was commended for its technical competence but rejected in that it had little new to say about a woman escaping from a failed marriage. One publisher suggested I consider changing the ending.”

The second para is funnier but I’ll leave it until I’m short of an idea.

A moral query and a small milestone

Talking to my neighbour Andy about the Battle of Britain I found he was a WW2 planes nut. As I am. He lent me treasured books on the subject, saying I’d be astonished by their prices. - two cost 15 shillings each, £0.75 these days. But it was their narrow-margin pages and occasionally indistinct pix that evoked those distant days; even in 1961 publishers were mean with paper. I’ve raised this subject before. Is it legitimate to idolise engines of destruction? Andy says if you lived through the war as a child (I did, he didn’t), fearing oblivion and buoyed up by very clever British propaganda perhaps it’s understandable if not forgivable.

Did you know what was the fastest piston-engine plane ever produced in the UK? The Supermarine Spiteful, of course.

ENDLICH Following Plutarch’s Homeric 1700-word final assessment the novel, Gorgon Times, is finished. It is possibly an unpopular story, but I wanted to tell it and I enjoyed every moment, even the endless revisions. The greatest pleasure came from details, even page-long scenes, which popped up unforeseen as if there were some delightful conspiracy between my conscious and subconscious mind. It is the best novel I’ve written which doesn’t of course mean it’s any good. Plutarch has been very kind (“driven as much by sentiment as moral sense” which made me proud) and others, presently reading the MS, may give me a hint or two.

One strange experience. Revising it for the nty-nth time I came upon a deliberately emotional scene near the end and my throat tightened – BB the author manipulating BB the reader! Jilly Cooper, not one of my touchstone authors, says the same thing happened to her. I should add she was reading her most recent novel, not mine.

Sentimentality takes different forms

Months ago I asked whether boy-babies responded more enthusiastically to toys rich in technical detail compared with those carved out of wood and sold for mega-pounds at Early Learning Centre. The post went to hell in a hack when Lucy and other former girl-babies revealed they’d preferred six-shooters and fire engines to dolls anyway. But atavism is never far away at Works Well.

Similarly I wondered why those fascinated with WW2 planes lost interest in the civil aircraft that succeeded them. I daydreamed whether boy-babies, now man-babies, felt more romantic about the utilitarian interiors of warplanes as cavities designed for one purpose alone. Having once sat in the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber during my RAF service I Googled the image (see above).

But forget all that. Almost adjacent on Google was this picture – the T (for transmitter) 1154 and R (for receiver) 1155 whereby the Lancaster kept in touch with other planes and the land it had left behind. Oh gentle but tolerant reader, believing old BB to have devoted his life solely to indulgent wordsmithing, I HAVE REPAIRED THAT KIT, blue/red/yellow knobs and all.


UGHHH Mrs BB, still a little fragile, made her first trip out today on snowy Hereford streets. We walked arm in arm encouraging a neighbour to comment on our decreptitude and triggering these alien Cockney words:

We've bin togevver nah for forty year,
And it don't seem a day too much,
There's not a lidy livin’ in vuh land
As I'd swap for mi dear Old Dutch.
(Altogevver, nah...)

Sometimes the cold dash of West Yorkshire tradition has its place.

Novel progress 12/1/10. Ch. 11: 3110 words. Chs. 1 - 10: 44,765 words. Comments: Hatch needs a woman, for various reasons.

... and now the nuts and bolts

Those familiar with this blog may think the helicopter (previous post) was more of an indulgence for me than for Mrs BB. Not true! She likes taking to the air and even enjoyed a float-plane flight over the mountains of New Zealand. But helicopters are techie and techie is my thing.

The financial side, however, is appalling. Our R44 Raven II (manufactured by the hopelessly mundane Robinson Helicopter Co) cost about £300,000 and demands an insurance premium of – wait for it! - £10,000. Inspections, servicing and hangerage push the flying bill to £200/hour. But it’s fast - 97 knots or, say, a ground speed of 120 mph. At one point Anthony, our pilot, needed to increase our cruising altitude of 1000 ft by half that again. Done in a veritable eye-blink.

But no hovering. It’s too expensive in fuel, I believe, and that’s why we missed our daughter’s village. Nostalgists who respond to quarter-inch plate would have been disappointed by the R44’s fragility. The doors flap like leaves and the joystick (or whatever it’s called) is a mere 10 mm aluminium tube. Weight-saving is apparent wherever you look.

Such a lightweight craft is sensitive to natural forces. We flew through a col in the Malverns where hillwalkers were able to look down on us. The approach was tranquil but the wind beyond the col buffeted our port side. Instrumentation is almost minimal; the top screen above the panel is a humdrum satnav, not much different from the one that guided our car to the Drum and Monkey. Nevertheless, I fear it’s the only way to travel.

Away from Channel gales

Forty-nine years ago Mrs BB and I emerged into a gale from the church of St Mary and St Eanswythe on Folkestone’s cliff tops (there’s a Turner painting that includes it) and stumbled into our married life. Today’s celebration was more tranquil and more uplifting. I’d arranged things secretly and Mrs BB, bemused by an hour’s drive into Worcestershire, swears she thought we were going to buy a sapling. In fact she spent the drive wondering how to dissuade me from this since we already have too many trees in our garden.The rendezvous was The Drum and Monkey near Upton-on-Severn where we later had lunch. Since the pub didn’t open until midday bemusement continued as we sat in the car making forced conversation.All was explained when a small helicopter (belonging to the egregious Richard Hammond of “Top Gear” as it happened) landed in an adjacent field and Anthony Stockman, our pilot, beckoned us over.

We failed to see the tiny fifteen-house village in Gloucestershire where our younger daughter lives. Nor did we spot the equally tiny village of Sellack which accommodates one of our favourite gastropubs. The area’s rural beauty is a constant diversion.But it’s not all beauty. We found Chez Bonden by first identifying Tesco, deservedly diminished from the air. Then up Golden Valley (location of the C. S. Lewis bio-film, Shadowlands) flanked by the Brecon Beacons,

a circular tour of Hay-on-Wye (above), down the Wye to skirt Hereford, pop over a gap in the Malverns and back to the D&M. With time to reflect on the randomness by which couples are brought together.

Why was he born at all?

I’ve had four near-death experiences. Technology was significant in three; absence of technology caused the fourth.
CLOSE KISS ONE Aged six or seven, I caught meningitis. Previously it would have been the Kiss of Death or being left as a vegetable, preferably not an aubergine. Luckily M&B sulfanilamide had just been invented and I lived on, my mental capacities only slightly diminished. Before, I was on course to be a genius.
CLOSE KISS TWO Unable to cure my athlete’s foot, the RAF flew me back from Singapore to Blighty as a CASEVAC (casualty evacuation). We took off in heavy rain from Negombo in what was then Ceylon. At a point close to no-return the pilot knew we weren’t going to make it and slammed on the brakes. The jungle loomed. This was 1957 when planes crashed a lot.
CLOSE KISS THREE Riding my motorbike down a steep hill, with the whole of my LP collection stuffed in the front of my raincoat, I met a car (the make of which I shamefully cannot recall) across the road, hit it amidships, somersaulted over the top, and not an LP was scratched.
CLOSE KISS FOUR I embarked on a solo ascent of a route called Fairy Steps (rated Very Difficult) which I had climbed before. A flake of rock weighing perhaps a ton and which had supported many other climbers over decades, broke off, broke in two and fell with my unroped body into a narrow gulley to form a Bonden sandwich.

OBSERVATIONS (1) No previous-life flashes. (2) No curses. (3) No Arghhhh. (4) I was being saved to write this blog.

PS: My brother, having read this post, sent me a photo of the Fairy Steps climb before the I unwittingly modified the route.

Here's my idea of a hero

Definitions of a hero include “a man admired for great achievements”. For me that describes Andy, a neighbour who’s building a plane in his garage. Not a microlight but a real twin-seater, a Vans RV9A. He’s been at it for several years and admits the final step will probably require sponsorship, or some other external source, to acquire the £22,000 for the engine and the avionics.

Even though the Vans is a simple plane and Andy says you don’t need to be an engineer, the work requires patience and a meticulousness I know I don’t possess. He mentioned a typical recent task: positioning the tailplane so the holes to secure it could be drilled in the rear fuselage. Thereafter the tailplane was detached and stowed away again. Heck, if I’d managed to attach it I sure as hell would be disinclined to take it off again. But lack of space forces many space-saving measures.

As to being meticulous… he showed me a discarded fuel pipe. In bending it he’d introduced a tiny kink which he couldn’t live with (“I’d know it was there.”). Of course, it makes a difference when you know you’ll be flying the plane yourself. Another encouragement is that each finished sub-assembly must be professionally inspected before it’s all put together.

Total cost? Earlier, when interviewing him for a website I run, we came up with: “the price of a mid-range BMW”. Now, he shrugs his shoulders. “Let’s say one of the cheaper Aston Martins.” And there’s another vital ingredient: a radio tuned perpetually to Radio 4, according to a mate who was helping.

Can numbers be romantic?

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.)

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.