Author Archives: Ben

Empire of the Clouds

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One of the joys of my particular childhood was that where some kids get dragged out to the park or the common on a Sunday afternoon, we got drug to the SAS training ground at Pontrilas, just down the road from Hereford. I could scavenge the derelict buildings for the plasticine left over from the boys’ plastic explosive training; sometimes I might even get to shoot a gun; and there were a Vampire jet fighter and a Canberra bomber, both there for the boys to practice blowing up. They obviously weren’t very good at it, or else just shouted “BANG!” at the right moment because either way the planes were resolutely still there every time we visited. The Canberra was either sealed up or else the entrance was just too high up for a small boy to get into, but the Vampire was easily accessible so at a moment’s notice I could become Scott Tracy or a fearless starfighter pilot or whatever I wanted.

(This was also probably where I learnt the word “Vampire”. Also probably the word “Canberra”, but that one hasn’t really entered the mythology in the same way.)

All brought back to mind by reading the wonderful Empire of the Clouds by James Hamilton-Paterson: an unashamedly boy-geek book about Britain’s post-war aircraft industry, and why for a while we were producing the best (or at least most promising) aircraft in the world, and how it came to pass that nowadays we singularly don’t. It was a different age. A plane could disintegrate at the Farnborough airshow, killing both pilots and 27 spectators, and the programme would carry on with the pilot of the next plane up simply being advised to keep to the right to avoid the wreckage on the runway. The test pilots of the Comet knew when they had hit a certain speed because the external skin flexed with a particular banging sound – only later did it occur to them that this might mean the construction was quite flimsy. The mustn’t grumble/austerity way of life that had been perfected during WW2 carried on into peacetime and meant people could get away with risks and lifestyles that nowadays would get the entire fleet grounded. Unfortunately this attitude cut both ways, with the recommendations or outright pleas of experienced pilots being overruled by arrogant and complacent management who just expected them to get on with their job. The chief test pilot of Gloster, a decorated war hero and ipso facto one of the most important jet pilots in the world, was on a salary of £1500 – which translates to about £20k today.
And the politicians really didn’t help. For not very long in the fifties, but for just long enough to be truly suicidal, official policy was that the days of the fighter were over and from now on it was all guided missiles. The Fairey Delta, a truly world-beating fighter craft, was commissioned by the UK government, but new rules about supersonic overflight of populated areas meant it couldn’t be tested in the UK. Also, the government refused to pay for damage caused by sonic bangs and no UK insurance company would touch the matter. So, the head of Dassault invited the Brits over to France to test the plane there, and also put them in touch with a French insurance company that would cover the entire test for £40. The Fairey Delta was to fall by the wayside while Dassault was to produce the highly successful Mirage – which looked astonishingly similar, but to be fair that’s probably convergent evolution at work.
To be even fairer the author tries to show both sides of the coin. The cancellation of the TSR.2 was something that still causes people of a certain generation to spit out bits of ground glass, and was part of a Night of the Long Knives defence cut by Denis Healey that closed down four projects and ultimately left the RAF having to borrow fighters off the navy. And yet, the book does give the other picture – the reasons why the projects had to be shut down, which might have been inevitable but not necessarily with the same crass insensitivity.
History repeats itself in so many ways …
I think much of what the book describes was inevitable. The WW2 culture of dozens of companies turning out dozens of designs was never going to last long – too expensive, too inefficient. As planes get faster and faster, face it, they do all start to look astonishingly similar, so the wonderfully varied Thunderbirds-type future of my childhood dreams was doomed from a very early age. This book is still required reading for what was, what might have been, and what wasn’t.

Mondeo memories

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I got my car back today. Where has it been, you cry? Well, at the end of November a work colleague was a bit too eager to get away and turned a bit too sharply in the work car park, taking out my front right indicator and scraping the paint. Being a Volvo driver, she didn’t even notice until she got home, saw her own scraped paint and put two and two together.

I do so love it when it’s unequivocally, entirely someone else’s fault and there isn’t even a hint of contesting the matter – as it should be when the victim vehicle is unattended and parked squarely within a clearly marked parking space. The car hire company fixed up by her insurers was going to give me a 1 litre clown car, but when they heard what it was replacing they upgraded it to a 3-month old Mondeo at no extra cost (at least, not for me).

As with all new technology, it has ups and downs …

Ups – the Ford heated front window system is nothing short of a marvel in this weather, and even on its own it’s more than enough to swing my vote in favour of getting a Ford when the current car finally has to go, as one day it must. It was great for getting to Hertfordshire and back in the recent inclemency. The door handle (right hand side) and central console (left hand side) were great for resting my elbows on as I drove. Or rather, cruised. With the diesel engine I could pretend I was driving a tractor – sorry, tra’r – while at the same time the excitingly hi-tech dashboard and control-studded steering wheel pressed all the right Gerry Anderson fanboy buttons within me.

Downs – said central console means the handbrake has to be off the centre line, over to the right, and you almost dislocate your wrist getting the right angle to pull it upwards. I usually listen to my iPod via a tape adapter, and as this was too new for a tape player I got to try out the iTrip I once bought myself in a fit of technological experimentation … which was okay, but crackly. The proximity alert, especially in our crowded little back yard, sets off a veritable dawn chorus of differently toned beeps whenever I turn it on and put it into gear, which was quite a surprise the first time. It wouldn’t have done this quite so often if the car wasn’t so darn unnecessarily BIG and therefore already a lot closer to everything else than I would normally park. (And I now find I’ve got so used to it, after just a fortnight, that my ability to judge a safe parking distance has vanished and I want to park feet away from anything.)

But I have to say the good points outweighed the bad, and so it’s probably as well that I have the old car back before I was entirely seduced. It’s not perfect but we have a relationship based on long-term familiarity and trust and affection and an understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Which is as it should be.

Meanwhile I have now been phoned out of the blue by two separate ambulance chasers asking if anyone was hurt. Into every life a little slime must drip.

The rivals, consenting to be photographed together …