Bart Bear's Blog

You can always cause an energetic debate at our place by talking about your favourite aircraft. For instance, Mum likes modern, fast, noisy jet planes while Dad likes the old, slow propellor ones, preferably with more than one wing and lots of wire. I like all sorts. If Mum has to admit to liking any propellor type, she goes for this one, the Boeing B-17 Fortress. I think it is because she likes old war movies and the Yanks always make a big thing out of their B-17s. Dad won't have it. He points out that the British planes of the same period were much superior. The Lancaster carried a bigger load, further, and the Mosquito (at half the size and with less than a quarter the crew of the B-17) flew faster, higher and further with around the same load. I notice that doesn't stop him building models of the B-17 though. We have 5 different versions of it on our model shelves, but then we do have 7 different marks of Mosquito. Anyhow, on their big trip last year Mum got to see B-17s in the aviation museums at Duxford and Hendon. This one is at Duxford and is painted to represent a famous B-17 called "Memphis Belle". Mum was so excited by being able to get close to it that she kept getting between Dad's camera and the plane, so most of his photos of it have a bit of Mum's head in them as well.

Labels: aircraft, England