Friday 30th October
I went to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford today with the Gentleman’s Film and Leisure Club. It was great to be on a jolly outing, just cross the Essex/Cambridgeshire border with my pals.
It is a fascinating place, huge hangars housing hundreds of planes. It’s quite interesting how we have conquered flight and, in return, pay homage to the experts. So many aircraft are named after birds. Eagle, harrier, gannet, hawk, osprey, skua, hummingbird, grebe. The list goes on and on, and in a range of languages.
In one of the hangers, appropriately named sea and air, displays aircraft that are associated with water. There were a number of aircraft that fold up their wings or rotar blades. There was one that uniquely folds back its wings, in the same way that birds fold back their wings.
Yes, it’s practical and it is so that many can be stowed onboard an aircraft carrier. But it also feels more than coincidence that it took that specific design?
The plane designs I warm to are those that resemble living forms. Avian shapes endure. Helicopters are amazing machines, but they are just that, machines. They have no affinity to birds. Insects maybe (The Wasp) or winds (Chinook), but not birds.
The softer, smoother shapes. Curves and waves work best.
And it doesn’t stop there. Birds wings have been something we have traditionally revered for millennia and across many cultures. Pegasus, Icarus, Jinn, angels, the devil. Stories, myths, legends? The ability to fly is a strength that those who possess can use for good or bad.
But the single wing of the swan, used to cradle a woman and a recently born baby, takes the symbolism to a different place. It is thought that both mother and child possibly died during birth and were buried together on the wing to aid their flight to the next world.
The Bald Birder 