Would like to have seen Amber Heard do the snow depth test in hot pants...

I thought a crash was a landing that you didn't walk away from, looked a bit bumpy to me with a well positioned lump at the end to give it a dramatic twist round for the camera. Add in a sound effect for good measure and que lots of folk with nothing better to do haveing a go at Top Gear. :D

I think this thread got picked up from elsewhere on pprune and dumped here in general aviation - hence the "lively discussion" :)

I am all for TG being treated as a joke, which it is IMHO (very little information of value to a prospective car buyer).

I kinda liked Cessna 182 vs Bugatti Veyron
 

I found it hilarious entertainment. Especially the background music, with Clarkson crossing the Franco-Swiss border with the Marseillaise being played on a high octave metallophone while zooming in on a sh1tting rooster. And then May supposedly getting a "clearance" from French ATC causing him to turn almost 90 degrees on the soundtrack of "Where eagles dare..."

I don't think Volkswagen would have lent Top Gear their Veyron if the ageing 182 was meant to beat their £1M car.

So of course it was rigged / staged / whatever. And while May's general aviation touch is a good thing, I agree it is not an optimal GA promotion programme, but surely it is not Top Gear's mission to promote GA.

Incidentally, broadcasting companies are always on the lookout for GA-related documentaries. We recently had a 30 minute prime time show covering the Stampe fly-in at Antwerp airport, with additional historical touches about two Belgian pilots' escape to England in an SV4 during the occupation and about Elza Leysen sponsoring Stampe and being the first Belgian female aerobatic pilot (in the 30-ies).

So, if you feel the need to promote GA, it suffices to write a skeleton script and make some amateur video material as a proof of concept and discuss this with the BBC. Topics could be :
- Instrument flying to visit the UK's and/or mainland Europe's touristic spots
- General Aviation and Regional Airports in support of local business
- The £100 Hamburger or how to beat Network Rail
- ...

Not quite true, if you have £50,000 plus to spend, a lot of the reviews on Top Gear may help you decide on a particular model.

The antics on TG have attrcated a lot of column inches on pprune, usually by enthusiastic petrol heads who enjoy being ENTERTAINED :ugh:

The format has substantially changed from being a boring car magazine, to a [middle aged] lads entertainment programme - and is much the better for it. The car tests are incidental and although the perpetual power slides and the predictable outcome of the various challenges get tedious, it's still unique and great entertainment!!

If you're the type to analyse every detail, assess the feasibility of each situation and get worked up over any discrepancies, then I would suggest it's not the programme for you :ok:

I don't think so; the whole show is rigged for entertainment. It's meaningless as a factual guide to anything.

If I was spending 50k+ I would do some real due diligence :)

Only had one decent car on there to date new Mustang :8

Didn't Tom Cassells beat the Radical SR3, in his CAP 232?

I did say 'may'

The "crash" looked real enough. They landed on the undisturbed snow on the lake, and got into trouble once they got to the disturbed and rutted snow close to the lake shore.

The area disturbed by the combine was clearly compacted by snowmobiles prior to the aircraft landing (you can see the track patterns in the snow)


Looks like the pilot in LN-RAR cut magnetos once it started to go pear shaped.

Bollox, I've done much better crashes than that without leaving a scratch on myself or the aircraft ;)

Hardly a crash IMO. Nothing that wasn't carefully planned I'm sure. Still - great ENTERTAINMENT, eh?! :ok:

Some people really need to have their medication altered. Top Gear is entertainment and it does a good job at that. You don't have to watch it but when you do, you know it will probably be insulting, rude and irreverent. Which is why many people watch. So, here we are talking about a plane crash that wasn't. It was done for the camera, the shots and angles were almost certainly planned in advance and I'll no doubt wager it was flown by a commercial pilot. Was the plane bent? I doubt it. Did the guy know what he was doing? I reckon so. Was it entertaining? On balance yes.

And 182 vs Veyron? Do the sums. They are not difficult. If you hop in a 182 in the south of France and go for the UK, you'd need about five to six hours to get to London. So given the weather, the 182 will always win. So if you start the "race" within six hours of sunset, the pilot will have to have a night rating to continue flying. To allow the Veyron to win, they put in a night stop. Hey, they could have had average English weather and not flown at all. Again, don't worry little people, this was entertainment and not a factual programme. The only bit that pissed me off was the constant wingeing by the Hamster - that was childish, truly worthy of a Sun/Mail/Express reader. But probably written by James May who knows how to wind people up. But there we are - that's life.

PM

Nice one Mr P. Man - back to school though. Even at a modest cruise of 135 knots the 182 will do London in four hours from Milan. (well - if it's turbo'd I suppose as there are some big mountains in the way). Now where's my Daily Mirror? :) Geneva-London is three hours (in a straight line).

Ah, yes, but Captain Slows preflight took ages...:ok:

(At least, according to the Hamster.)

Mr Miller - For what its worth, I guessed five to six hours off the top of my head. Having looked at the route, as the crow flies, we are talking just over 470 nm. At 135 kts this gives a trip time of just under four hours. And as we are talking about a specific journey on Top Gear, we should really include the trip to the airport, planning and filing, pre-flight, the flight itself and then the trip from Biggin(?) to the Natwest Tower. So I reckon six hours was a reasonable guess. But do you really expect 135 kts groundspeed out of a 182? Some days yes but I'd suggest mostly no. Just out of interest, what do you reckon is the average wind over Europe at say 5,000'? And then there's the actual route that James May took. I think he took and excursion via Marseille and that would have given them approx. 700 track miles. So you can come and sit next to me at school and we'll pay more attention this time.

PM

What I don't understand is how anyone could begin to take TG seriously. All it is is a comedy show, and not a very funny one at that; a sad forlorn shadow of its former self as an excellent motoring programme. I take it for what it is, i.e. three grown men fannying about trying (and failing) to be funny, the motoring content is not even secondary anymore.

Smithy