The Good Old Days

[Mike Read]

In the last few weeks there have been several days with benign wx and persistent contrails. I remember in my youth (50s/60s) using gallons of the Queen's avtag trying to "paint" an elongated racetrack with two orbits attached to one end. Somebody created one such which hovered over Barnstaple for most of one morning. No doubt you are all too serious now to engage in such lighthearted tomfoolery. Or would you be shot? Or made to pay for the fuel?

Flying used to be fun in the good old days.

[Gainesy]

There have been some bollocks threads in the past but...

[Al R]

I suppose you could have competitions, with points awarded for artistic merit and detail..

[BEagle]

I recall a tale of some RAuxAF pilot drawing such a sky-willy over Edinburgh one Sunday in the early '50s....

Some irate god-botherer rang the Stn Cdr and told him to get rid of it.

So, a short while later, a whole posse of Meteors or somesuch whistled into the air to intercept the offending item in line abreast formation. Then ducked down below the contrail level, reformed and attacked it again at right angles, climbing back up to the contrail level.

What had initially been just a simple sky-willy now looked as though some censor had tried to rub it out - all they had done was to draw attention to it! Surprisingly enough, the god-botherer never did ring up to say thanks....

[Pontius Navigator]

I believe our colonial cousins are still know to fly high-spee, high-level orbits, 360 left 360 right, exit north west, 20 miles and return :)

November as I recall.

[Seymour Belvoir]

I remember drawing a similar picture in the Norwegian snow with the helicopter main wheels. Childish but very funny.:)

[Dan Gerous]

AOC's day at Lossie in 77 or 78, an intrepid Jag Pilot showed his artistic prowess by painting a large phallus over the airfield.

[Wader2]

Dan Gerous, who was the station commander :)

[Cameronian]

During GW1 I was in a friend's boat fishing (well, he was but it bores me stiff - I was enjoying a beer) about a mile offshore, to the south of Mallorca. Fabulous day, not a cloud etc., when I saw a contrail way up high start to paint a huge letter "S". It must have taken a minute or so. Then, perhaps another minute later it was crossed by two new parallel contrails making an almost perfect huge "$". My friend photographed it with a little compact camera but I never got to see the result and he has since died.

Telling it to others over the next few days resulted in my being put in my place because lots of others had seen it too......:hmm: