You are making me feel old !
Seems yesterday ( ok I'll try to avoid cliches from now on ) that I photographed the 25th Anniversary of the Harrier, or to be more exact, the first tethered lift off by Bill Bedford in XP831.
25 years later to the day, I was on a worryling wobbly alloy staging, taking shots while Heinz Frick hovered G-VTOL in front of me low over the same spot.
V-TOL had 2,500 'First Day Covers' in the port aft equipment bay, which were printed with the first hover shot on one side, the other side blank.
When I'd got my ( also black & white ) shot, I hot-footed it to Dunsfold photographic & printed the results.
They were then taken laboriously by some rustic means, to the printing house which placed my 'modern day' shot on the blank half of the covers.
This being BAe, I never even saw one of these, let alone get one !
So, I took a 10 x 8" print to Heinz who signed it for me - in my view a lot better than a first day cover anyway...
I was one of 2 photographers at Dunsfold, mainly covering trials & development work, only occasionally the 'pretty
PR shots' which the Kingston mafia loved.
Although
PR shots can be fun, they are often just a pain, especially if dealing with
PR people !
I was much happier dealing with designers, pilots & engineers, which was a positively alien concept to the
PR bunch.
If you should care to privately give me an e-mail address, I'll happily send copies of that pic' and others from Harrier trials etc, some of which you may not have seen before.
DZ