A glass duly raised to you Cliff. I doubt if you had any idea of what you were starting back then, but thank you for doing so. It has been a journey in the company of good friends and fellow aviators. Long may it continue!
Danny, as ever you give us a rich and varied diet to feast on. The Peugeot company certainly had an eye for detail, a real engineer's product rather than that of the beancounters. As to Dieppe, even if it were a cover to capture Enigma machines, it was poorly planned and the cost was out of all proportion to any supposed D-Day rehearsal lessons to be learned. The only lesson I would have suggested was not to put Mountbatten in charge of any thing larger than a whelk stall, but of course no such lesson was learned. Thanks for the Memphis Belle heads up, am watching it now as I type so I'm obviously not taking it that seriously!
Geriaviator, your picture of the Castle Archdale slipway is amazing. I haven't counted the number of Sunderlands and Catalinas crowded in such a narrow space but they must compete with the number of aircraft crowded onto a carrier deck. I assume that they were allocated to tasks from the waterfront first, or how else were the ones at the back ever going to get launched? I'm surprised anyway that so many were out of the water, presumably on trolleys, as I always understood that they were left at moorings between flights unless undergoing heavy maintenance or repair. The Sunderland's leading edges hinged down to form a gantry which could then be extended to encompass the engines for daily maintenance, though anything dropped was invariably lost of course.
The first amendment I carried out was to my newly issued QR's, from which I removed all regulations relating to the issue of hard lying allowances to crews required to slip moorings and spend all night taxiing Flying Boats into wind when bad weather required it.
Could your picture be taken after hostilities had ceased, and there was no further need to keep the aircraft waterborne and thus requiring less daily attention?
Great videos, Reader 123. The trick of synchronising adjacent propellers by bringing the strobing shadow formed between them to a halt is well recalled. The real trick then of course was to bring the beat between the port and starboard pairs to a halt as well. A game that kept Flight Engineers occupied throughout a flight. Later it could be done electronically, which in the end did for the Flight Engineers as well sadly.