Smile of the day - What is yours?

[Sir Trev]

Originally Posted by Red ones

I may be in my 40's but I still find knob screws amusing.

Mind, gutter, tut!

[Red ones]

Come on. You thought it too!

[Sir Trev]

Er, well, might have done....

[shiftin_gear98]

Inspired by LPH, and as it's only 25 mins down the road. Great to see the Spitfire practicing for the upcoming airshow. What a noise! BRRAAPPP. Very impressive watching the barrel rolls in the rain.
And yes I know that's not a Spitfire. But anything that can go mach 3.. Damn.

[maviczap]

Originally Posted by shiftin_gear98

Inspired by LPH, and as it's only 25 mins down the road. Great to see the Spitfire practicing for the upcoming airshow. What a noise! BRRAAPPP. Very impressive watching the barrel rolls in the rain.
And yes I know that's not a Spitfire. But anything that can go mach 3.. Damn.

There's a great story about a blackbird pilot playing a game of one upmanship with other pilots who are talking to air traffic control, each one broadcast's their speed over land, one after the other with increasing speed until the blackbird pilot broadcast's his!

Don't know if it's a true story, but it was funny.

I'll see if I can find it

[shiftin_gear98]

There was a guide telling a facts about the blackbird. How they only just put enough full in it to take off as when it's on the ground it leaks. It had to be designed to stretch. All the panels and threads are a loose fit. Once in the air it's fuelled up. Then swoops down and picks up speed to mach 3. The heat generated turns the black body blue and the fuselage stretches a yard. Pretty clever engineering. He also said how in active service one was fired upon with a missile. The air tower informed the pilot who looked out of his window and matched the missiles speed keeping it the same distance away until it used it's fuel and fell away.
Had a good day out.

[Littlepeahead]

Tom Hiddleston. In very tight jeans. And a body hugging T shirt. In a theatre so tiny he was just a few feet away. That's my kind of Shakespeare. Aside from the obvious drool factor that you chaps really won't appreciate, it was actually an excellent production. Very different to Cumberbatch at the Barbican. Hiddleston flipped from funny to fraught, with believable grief. The graveside was injected with humour and he even disco danced.

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

[Sir Trev]

Originally Posted by maviczap

There's a great story about a blackbird pilot playing a game of one upmanship with other pilots who are talking to air traffic control, each one broadcast's their speed over land, one after the other with increasing speed until the blackbird pilot broadcast's his!

Don't know if it's a true story, but it was funny.

I'll see if I can find it

Do a YouTube search on LA Speed Check. Excellent clip from an ex-SR71 pilot. On my tablet right now so difficult to copy and paste it.


Hope you've recovered now Clare...

[maviczap]

Yep that's the one

[SV650rules]

The Americans first attempts at spy plane were a flop and they used English Electric Canberra for quite a while as it could get to over 60,000 feet, they then came up with the U2 which is more like a glider than a plane (needs the long wings because there isn't much air when you get to around 70,000 feet) but better Russian Surface to air missiles soon put paid to that - then the Blackbird came along, IIRC a blackbird was once close to being downed by a SAM but the explosion was too far from plane apparently.

Bit of trivia about Honda Blackbird, the Hyabusa is a Japanese Hawk that preys on Blackbirds - someone at Suzuki had a sense of humour.