Jamie R

After much worry about her flying future, it has now been announced that Richard Branson will step in to cover the extra insurance costs on IWM Duxford’s Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress “Sally B”. It had been grounded due to the fact that the EU (European Union) had imposed extra liability insurance costs totaling an extra £1,000 per flying hour. The legendry B-17 bomber, which only flys about 20 hours a year was grounded after the IWM found that they simply could not meet the extra cost.

At the Duxford VE Day Anniversary Airshow Sally B was grounded and open for the first time to members of the public. I paid my £2 to go inside and take a good look around and felt that I had helped (even though a tiny tiny tiny bit) to find the extra £20,000 the Imperial War Museum needed. The future of Sally B was still unclear until this week when Richard Branson agreed to fund the IWM with the extra funds required to get her off the ground again using his Airline Virgin Atlantic.

The article from ThisisLondon reads:
“Sir Richard Branson has stepped in to ensure the UK’s last remaining airworthy Flying Fortress B-17 bomber will be able to take part in next month’s fly-past over Buckingham Palace to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

Sir Richard’s airline Virgin Atlantic is to cover the costs of the liability insurance of the American-made plane – the Sally B – to enable it to continue flying for the next three months.

New EU regulations had resulted in a rocketing of insurance costs and it was feared that the plane, based at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford in Cambridgeshire, would not be able to take part in the July 10 fly-past.”

This means that for the next three months Sally B can fly for the July 10th flypast at Buckingham Palace as well as Duxford’s Flying Legends Airshow of which I will be attending (stick revising for that week )

Jamie.

You may be thinking what I’m all about right now..well you probably aren’t but I’ll say this anyway. Some people might say that I’m full of bullshit when it comes to my website – “I’ll do it soon”, “I *will* finish that part soon” and then seeing that god knows how long later the bit (usually me aircraft site) which badly needs overhauling is still in bits with the same old deprecated code and design that its had for the last year. I’m not one for letting people down – my friends will say that I’m someone who likes to get stuff done when I see that it needs doing. True, I’m a bit like that however my current situation of my life (Year 10 = first year of GCSE’s) means that I don’t have as much time to devote to this website as I did last year. Last year I updated the site every week or more often than that and wrote about quite a lot of stuff whereas this year I’ve admittidly done sod all to it because of my other commitments.

If you were thinking “why doesn’t that lazy git get off those forums and actually do some work” then you’re mistaken – I don’t just bugger around on my computer(s) all the time – I like to have a equal share of work and leisure time. However because of mittigating circumstances at this time the site has somewhat fallen to the back of my mind for a bit. I’m not one of the hardest working students at school, I admit that. However I do try damn bloody hard when it comes to school. IT, English, RE and Science are my strongest areas with Maths and PE becoming ever increasingly more important seeing as I’ve always been a little bad on the mathematics side of things.

I’ve always wanted to get more into computer programming doing stuff like Ruby, vC++ dotNet and Assembly as well as doing what I currently do – XHTML/CSS and PHP. Programming requires a lot of logic as most of it revolves around mathematics – after all the first computer was designed for mathematic calculations. One of my IT Teachers said to me a while back “There’s no point being good at IT and being rubbish at Maths because they are all linked” – he had a point, they are. In terms of PE..well dare I say more?

Anyway, the point of this post is to tell you that I won’t be able to do much on this site for a while longer yet because of what I have to do already. The summer holidays are starting around the usual time in mid July so I’ll have a bit more time to devote to this website apart from getting my ass off to Duxford and [maybe] RIAT :p

I’ve finally got around to posting most of my review of Duxford’s VE Day Anniversary Airshow almost a month since the actual airshow. I haven’t totally finished it in terms of the full participating aircraft as I have a lot on my plate at the moment, however I’ll finish it as soon as I can. A bulk of the review is there though.

You can find it here

Jamie.