Shaggy Sheep Driver

Despite the amount of pies I eat I don't think I could be called a 'Mega corporation' (yet) :-)

We found out this morning that the printers screwed up big time with the subs copies. To cut a long story short they weren't despatched as they should have been on Tuesday.

They are, as we speak (Friday lunchtime), being sealed and posted (1st class) by a bunch of red faced, sore ar*ed people in Kent.

Big apologies from Seager Towers, home of the mega pie, but not mega corporation :-)

Ian

I was led to believe that most people living in Kent have this problem.

:p

MJ

Ian - 'number' of pies, not 'amount' of pies. You'd better get one of the many editorial staff from Seager Towers to sub your posts ;~)

So, if you actually do enjoy the freedom in print that used to be exercised by James, that's an advantage to you that is no longer available to 'Pilot'. Or have those non-PC days gone?

SSD

hmmm...years ago (25+) I would inhale every word of every flying mag I could lay my hands on...as the years role on, and the hours of hard won experience pile up I find I don't read any of them regularly...most not at all.

Articles are, imo, usually very 'light on' in most respects. Soft subjects covered in a way that suggests the writer really doesn't have THAT much direct experience. Flight reports on specific aircraft are almost not worth reading because you can just tell that they are mostly free advertising.

Then you read someone like Farley and his ilk and they are rivetting...because the depth of knowledge/experience is obvious.

John Deakins articles, on Avweb, are similarly rivetting because he's expert and he calls a spade a f**king spade.

Basically, and not unlike Pprune in some respects, if you took every flying mag for the last five years and read them back to back you'd discover there's about 14 topics that get rerun every year. Every Autumn the cold weather articles and every spring the TS/windshear articles in US Flying for instance.

Chuck.

Pilotage did send me a pm stating some of the difficulties he had in compiling the 450 kg microlight article I referred to which was nice of him. He stressed the fear of companies taking legal action several times - as he has in this thread.

My response is what a load of boll**ks!

Legal action only works when what is written is defamatory or intended to damage. If it is factually correct then any legal action can be laughed at.

I suspect it is much much more about advertising. Disgrunted manufacturer does not advertise latest wonderplane which in 5 years time is no longer a microlight in magazine that highlights this fact? I doubt that individually it could have much effect, but given that so many of these machines are so limited the cumulative effect could be quite large. It is the editorial fear of cutting a revenue line that I suspect largely determines the near total lack of criticism of anything produced by people who sell things. Which was something Pilot certainly was not scared of in the past.

Then of course there are the 'flight tests' where having praised the flying properties of this excellent machine, coincidence, coincidence it is for sale..........

Didn't topgear go down this route.

Although they dodn't have advertising to worry about.

They seem to slate quite a few cars and have no problems.

MJ

I think Clarkson did it before he was famous. It was when he worked for a car mag (Autocar?? don't really know which one) and got pis*ed off by the circus where you write a rave review of (say) Ford's latest, and in return they advertise in your mag and invite the journos to exotic locations for 'test sessions'.

Clarkson broke the mould and wrote the truth about some abominable car or other. The advertising still came in, and JC still got his invites to places nice.

SSD