Thursday 1 February 2007

Some girls are bigger than others


One of our family stories (every family has them) is that my mum's dad, a shipwright during WW11 helped build Short Sunderland flying Boats. These impressive craft helped save the world for democracy by helping win the battle of the atlantic. Well, so what, well the picture next to this piece isn't 60 years old nor is it a full sized Sunderland giving it to Das Boot. No it's a model.

Model builders are routinely portrayed as weirdos, geeks and spods, someone to be laughed at by the cooler than thou media. Along with trainspotters these mild mannered blokes get disproportionate amount of abuse. But like all hobbist they are mostly harmless and bring a lot of charm, humour, wit, skill, art, experience and fun to their pastimes. These pictures and film are from a web site called the large model association , which isn't a dodgy porn site but a review of huge remote control planes, some a quarter scale. To put that in context the airfix kits you may have made in your youth where 1: 72 scale and had wings 10 cm long the models the lads from LMA make have 5 m wing spans and bigger.

What drew me to the sunderland guy was that he was having too much fun not only is flying this huge plane on a local liake but he gets his mate witth RC sub and they fight each other! Top stuff.

The video of the take off is brilliant, shot from inside the plane it looks like a real take off fantastic! And all this was done because we are all a long time dead.

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