Electric cars.

It would be a dream to fly in a Spitfire, last time I looked it was over £2k from Biggin Hill, a little cheaper from a less well known aerodrome. Not sure my stomach could take any aerobatics though, I get giddy on the kid's playground roundabout.

 

Same price from Duxford (Imperial War Museum) up the road from us, but it does include a free pass to the museum and refreshments . They sometimes allow you to fly the plane as well. They have different prices for different lengths of time but whatever time they say you are flying you need to consider that ten minutes of that time are not in flight.

 

About 50 years ago Mrs S and myself were guests of 'Durex' (a long story ) and were flown into and out of Brands Hatch by helicopter (they sponsored the Surtees Team) for the Formula 1 Grand Prix. We got free earplugs to wear for the flight and to use at the track.

 

As we seem to have run out of EV stories and gone off topic I shall continue off topic.

Scary flight:- In 1982 we were flying into Manaus, the capital of the Amazon State, on Varig one of Brazil's national airlines. All we could see below was rainforest and the Amazon and it had been a very smooth flight on a DC10 (in those days it was a rival to the Jumbo jet) and we were descending smoothly but rapidly for our landing. As it is usually a fairly easy landing the captain was chatting to the passengers over the speakers when suddenly he swore and did a sharp left turn and climbed as fast as possible back into the sky.

Leaving out all the swear words, he pulled back into level flight and explained that at that time of year there were only two large plane scheduled flights that landed there and everyone knew the timing. Apparently a .... stupid pilot of a four seater decided to take off, although flight control had told him not to, straight in front of us. He told us his co-pilot was even more angry than him as he had spilled hot cover over his nether regions. He said that they would look for that pilot next time they were at Manaus.

 

@Selleri

As we're still off topic:- and just for you - so don't tell anyone else I'll try to give an abbreviated version. The full version would fill a book if I told some of the ancillary stories

I have done a number of jobs in my life and and was always brought up to understand that you had to work hard to get on in life (family was from the East End of London).

Missing out all my previous jobs (from the age of 8 onwards) I owned my own hairdressing salon from the late 50's. most of the business at the time was men's hairdressing and when the Beatles and Rolling Stones became popular it hit the business quite hard as the fashions went from short hair to long hair. This also affected the businessmen's haircut habits as they went from having a haircut every 3-4 weeks to every 6-8 weeks. So we were losing almost a half of our business. I understand that almost a third of barber shops in the country closed during those years.

I didn't want to get rid of staff so we all had a meeting to try and think of things to do when we weren't busy. The main thing we came up with was for me to look into selling contraceptives by mail order (the early version of online selling) as there were a lot of ads for them in magazines and the national papers. As we already sold them over the counter ("something for the weekend, sir?") I had the contacts for me to be able to investigate if it could be done.

After a lot of negotiation with the London Rubber Company (Durex) I arrived at a good deal with them and started advertising, slightly undercutting the opposition, and the business gradually picked up. I also started advertising and selling sex aids in the same ads.

I set up an office at the back of the salon and I did the paperwork and the staff, when not busy doing haircuts, did the packaging. I also did a deal with the post office so that we didn't need to put stamps on the envelopes (plain brown!). Instead I negotiated for them to pick up our mail bags from us and we had a contract number on a rubber stamp to put on each package. I negotiated for my contract number to be 69.

The business got large enough for the area director of Durex (their H.O. was only a 20 minute drive away) to visit regularly, have his haircut, and take my order. As they sponsored the Formula 1 team Mrs S and I were invited as guests to the Grand Prix. Wined and dined, they had a big marquee, and seats in the grandstand. I was never interested in the sport, still aren't, but wanted to fly in a helicopter.

They also took us to the Power Boat Grand Prix (their name plastered over one of the boats) and that was a lot more enjoyable. Transport to Bristol, two nights in a deluxe hotel, slap up dinner and a show (Side By Side By Sondheim) and a nightclub visit. They had about 50 'special' guests and the others were all posh!

It saved my staff from losing their jobs.

 

What was that word?