Jamie R

Hey

Well where to start – as you might have noticed, and as one person actually emailed me to ask me why (thanks Roy), my site has been off line for the past week. This has been due to the unforeseen fact that I hadn’t renewed my hosting account (domain and hosting were both up for renewal at the same time) and so my site went off line. I couldn’t renew anything before due to lack of money. I guess my host is pretty cheap at £30 a year for hosting for an *alright* hosting spec and because my site doesn’t use a great deal of server resources (only about 4 or 5 gig a month on average traffic) my current host suffices.

In other news apart from hosting, I’ve been pretty busy in the last week. I like being busy, except last weak was*really* tiring. Saturday 7th July I went to the annual war bird gathering up at Duxford – the Flying Legends air show. I’ve upload shed loads of pics (only a few compared to the amount I did take, most of which were crap) to my gallery. You can find the album here. I was really looking forward to the airs how seeing as the star of the show would be a Lockheed P-38 Lightning nicknamed “Glacier Girl” which was part of a flight of 6 P-38 Lightnings and 2 B-17 Flying Fortresses flying from North America to the UK in 1942. The pilots of the mission, called “Operation Bolero” downed over Greenland due to bad weather and ended up landing on the ice. The crew were rescued after several days of being on the ice; however the aircraft were left there. In 1992 however, an expedition to the site of the crash landings resulted in one (and the least damaged) P-38 being lifted from 268 foot of ice. A ten year restoration project began and on 26th October 2002 P-38 41-7630 took to the skies for the first time, 60 years after being ditched over Greenland.

“Operation Bolero II” was finally organized, and preparations were made for the second attempt at the mission. This time, just with the P-38, which by now had been dubbed “Glacier Girl” and a recently restored P-51D Mustang (TF-51D 44-84847) called “Miss Velma” which was being flown over to the UK to become The Fighter Collection’s latest acquisition. However, Glacier Girl’s involvement in Operation Bolero II ended abruptly on 26th June when coasting out of Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada with “Miss Velma”, she started trailing coolant. Steve Hinton (pilot of Glacier Girl who had also flow every previous post-restoration flight in her) managed to get her back to Goose Bay where she was inspected. The problem turned out to be major – a cooling vent had popped off the right engine. All 4 aircraft returned to Goose Bay (P-38 and P-51 with support aircraft in the form of a Cessna Citation Sovereign and a Pilatus PC-12) and so the flight continued once more without Glacier Girl. The right engine will now need a massive overhaul, and there are rumors that both engines might be replaced. Miss Velma eventually made it to Duxford on July 4th after being weathered in Scotland for a few days. Hopefully Glacier Girl will make an appearance at Duxford soon – Operation Bolero III is in talks, so hopefully we’ll see her at Legends 2008.

In other news away from air shows, I saw Metallica at Wembley Stadium on Sunday 8th July. It was a really long, tiring day seeing as I’d been up to Cambridge a day before and been at Legends all day. However, it was a GREAT concert – Metallica are far better live than I thought they would be. The supports were Mastodon, Machine Head and HIM. I can safely say that I didn’t really like Mastodon, and HIM were pretty much hated throughout their set. With the crowd all shouting “fuck off back to Finland”, I’m kinda assuming a lot of people didn’t like them. Ah well, I personally quite like HIM. I think they’re a good band – everyone’s different though. I went with a few mates and we got on a coach organized by our local newspaper which picked us up at Clacton Station and took us straight to Wembley. Was a good day! I’ve put pictures up here.

Gonna go and book my driving test now, going to see when they have dates etc!

Chow!