Bi in the Sky
I really must listen more carefully whilst half-watching the TV. I'm guessing that I'm like many other web users out there who frequently sit on the sofa with a laptop or tablet, surfing the web, with the TV on in the background, half-listening and watching it, only glancing up and giving it our full attention when something really leaps out and grabs your attention. Well, I was doing this during the news the other day, when I was sure that I heard the newsreader say that the UK was going to send a biplane to Nigeria to assist the government in the hunt for the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haran, (who are apparently a terrorist group, not a progressive rock group). I immediately had visions of a Tiger Moth biplane flying over Africa, with the guy in the observer's seat leaning over the edge of the fuselage and anxiously scanning the ground below with a large pair of binoculars. At which point I realised that the newsreader had said spy plane, not biplane.
Mind you, the idea of us sending a spy plane seemed equally bizarre, didn't the current Tory government gleefully scrap a whole load of nearly completed and very expensive new Nimrod surveillance aircraft on the grounds that it would somehow save money? I was under the impression that this was yet another defence capability the Tories say we don't need as the next war will be entirely virtual and fought online, (they've seen Goldeneye, they know the threat posed by Russian hackers). So maybe the spy plane really is a biplane. I mean, the RAF used to swear by them - well into the 1930s most of their fighter squadrons were equipped with open cockpit biplanes, as they RAF was still dubious as to the advantages of modern monoplanes. They had a point - biplanes were good enough to shoot that giant ape off of the Empire State building in 1933, after all, so it seemed logical that they'd be good enough to take on the Luftwaffe and its new-fangled monoplanes. Likewise, a biplane would probably be more effective, and no less tokenistic, than a sophisticate spy plane in Nigeria. But it wouldn't look as impressive. Which is what matters to Dave.
Mind you, the idea of us sending a spy plane seemed equally bizarre, didn't the current Tory government gleefully scrap a whole load of nearly completed and very expensive new Nimrod surveillance aircraft on the grounds that it would somehow save money? I was under the impression that this was yet another defence capability the Tories say we don't need as the next war will be entirely virtual and fought online, (they've seen Goldeneye, they know the threat posed by Russian hackers). So maybe the spy plane really is a biplane. I mean, the RAF used to swear by them - well into the 1930s most of their fighter squadrons were equipped with open cockpit biplanes, as they RAF was still dubious as to the advantages of modern monoplanes. They had a point - biplanes were good enough to shoot that giant ape off of the Empire State building in 1933, after all, so it seemed logical that they'd be good enough to take on the Luftwaffe and its new-fangled monoplanes. Likewise, a biplane would probably be more effective, and no less tokenistic, than a sophisticate spy plane in Nigeria. But it wouldn't look as impressive. Which is what matters to Dave.
posted by Doc Sleaze at
9:25 pm
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