Supermarine Spitfire

Supermarine Spitfire Grey Nurse

Grey Nurse was a member of No. 457 Squadron RAAF that was transferred to Australia in 1942. It's now in the Temora Air Museum in Australia:

This aircraft was the last Spitfire acquired by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) with the original Military serial number A58-758. It was built by Supermarine in England in 1944, test flown and then shipped to Australia. The Air Force took delivery of the aircraft in April 1945, and, with World War II drawing to a close, the aircraft was not required on active service and was instead placed into storage.

A few years ago the airplane was modified to add a second seat for a passenger and now is giving rides.

Royal Air Force:

The iconic Supermarine Spitfire was critical in defeating Luftwaffe air attacks during the Battle of Britain in 1940. More Spitfires were built than any other British combat aircraft before or since World War Two - 20,341 in total. There are five Spitfires on the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.

SPITFIRE Mk. IXb - Flown as it should be! | Flying Legends
PaddyPatrone

SPITFIRE (2018) | Official Trailer | Altitude Films
Altitude Films Links:

Wikipedia page
Duck Me 2
Catapult to Oblivion

Apex - Netflix Movie

Apex | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Ninety minutes of Charlize Theron performing death defying stunts while being chased by a cannibalistic serial killer. She climbs unclimbable vertical rock walls, kayaks down rampaging rivers and bounces off rocks. Is she trying to outdo Tom Cruise? Or maybe, like her character, she is an adrenalin junky. It's terrifying.

Apex movie shooting locations near Sydney Australia

Besides Australia, portions of the movie were shot in New Zealand and at the Troll Wall in Norway. Locations via reddit.

Charlize is 50 years old.

Verners Pattern prismatic marching compass

This British WW1 compass shows up a couple of times. Plenty of them for sale.

Alice Springs

We’re hiring – Civil Lawyer (Alice Springs)
Central Australian Women’s Legal Service

Another short video from yesterday's doom scrolling. Alice Springs? That sounds familiar, but where is it? Sounds deserty, and it is. It's smack dab in Northern Territory, Australia, just down the road from Pine Gap.

Modesty

An airman inspects his B-25’s four nose mounted .50 caliber machine guns. The .75mm cannon can be seen on the lower right portion of the nose.
Note the machine guns mounted in pods on the outside of the cockpit.

I'm reading Indestructible by John R. Bruning. It's about Pappy Gunn and his experience fighting the Japanese in the early days of WW2 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It's a bit of a slog, about half of the book is repetitive emotional clap-trap, but the actual story is fascinating. I'm a little past half way through and he is the process of mounting eight 50 caliber machine guns to the nose of a B-25. His group is also involved in flying missions out of Charters Towers, Australia, supporting the garrison at Port Moresby, New Guinea. On page 300 we get this report of one flight to Port Moresby:

After work after weeks of working long hours and stifling hot hangers, those flights to Moresby afforded him the chance to air himself out a bit, much to the astonishment of the skeleton crew who ran with him. 

He donned an aboriginal loincloth and would stretch his shirt and slacks out behind the pilot seat to let them get some air, too. This cost him dearly once when somebody opened a side window in the cockpit somewhere over the Coral Sea the sudden jet of the slipstream into the cockpit blew his clothes into a whirlwind. Before he could catch them, they spun right out the side window. Normally, that would just have been an aggravation, but Pappy's pocket contained at least $1,000 in pay and poker winnings. The actual amount varied on the telling and retelling by his pals but even worse was his arrival at Port Moresby in nothing but a loin cloth. As they parked at the Airdrome there, a group of females - either Red Cross workers or nurses - showed up with coffee and snacks for the crew. Pappy refused to get out of the cockpit. Always modest, the idea of a woman other than Polly [his wife] seeing him in such a state roused him to panic fury. He demanded that somebody get him a change of clothes, and when his crew wouldn't stop laughing, legend has it he threatened to shoot them. Somebody finally got him a shirt and a pair of slacks he dressed while muttering a constant stream of invectives, then dropped out of the B-25's hatch and stormed off.

Charters Towers to Port Moresby

Update next day replace Darwin with Charters Towers.

Pipeline Ships

Pipelay process on Allseas' Pioneering Spirit
Allseas

Aegir Deepwater Construction Vessel (DCV)

Aegir DCV lays pipelines across the ocean floor. Unlike the Pioneering Spirit (video above), the Aegir uses the J-Lay technique which involved assembling the pipe sections in the tower and dropping the new sections out the bottom of the ship. This only works in deep water, but there is plenty of deep water out there.

Gorgon Project Overview Producing Liquefied Natural Gas in Australia
ordunsnews

I saw another, better quality video about the construction of the pipelines that serve the underwater wells of the Gorgon Project, but the internet ate it and I cannogh be finding it capin.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands

Heard Island and McDonald Islands

I hear all the noise being made about Trump imposing tariffs on an uninhabited island. I didn't understand why people were making such a fuss. I suppose they were hoping to embarrass President Trump. No, that's not right, he's not going to be embarrassed by this nonsense. They (the ubiquitous 'they') are just throwing mud on his image, hoping to further inflame 'their' supporters', not that they really need any more flammable fluids. They seem to have plenty on hand.

Then I came across this meme on Midwest Chick's Place:

Heard Island

There we go - Heard Island belongs to Australia. As the map at top shows, it is a long, long way from anywhere. Wikipedia tells us that:

They are:

• 2,500 miles southwest of Australia
• 2,600 miles southeast of South Africa
• 1,010 miles north of Antarctica

The islands, which are uninhabited, can be reached only by sea, and typically require a two-week voyage from Australia to visit.

 

Dragon Art

Sydney World Square

Similar view on Google Maps.

Territory - Netflix Series

Territory | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Set on a modern day cattle station in northern Australia, it's like a return to the old west. It's an entertaining show. We've got plenty of panoramic shots of the expansive landscape, and lots of scenes of modern day cattle ranching. There are several competing cattle stations (ranches) in the area, and their competition often involves what some people might call unfair methods and sometimes includes outright stealing of cattle. 

The show opens with a man riding on his horse when the horse unexpectedly rears up, dumping the man off. He suffers a compound fracture of his leg. Out in the bush, no gun or radio or water. The smell of blood attracts dingos (wild dogs) and they pile on and kill him. This has got to be the very worst way to die. Much later we find that another character shot the horse, which is what started this catastrophe. Even worse, that person didn't lift a finger to save this guy. They must have hated him something awful.

So yeah, we have a completely disfunctional family run by an old bear. None of the other ranch bosses are any better. A complete collection of slimeballs. Some of the kids seem to be all right, but most of the old hands are real shitheads.

Wikipedia page. The old bear is played by Robert Taylor who also played Agent Jones in The Matrix. The old bear's grandson, Marshall Lawson, is played by Sam Corlett who we saw as Leif Erikson in Vikings: Valhalla

Cirrus SR-20

Cirrus SR-20 (VH-QOL) & his big buddy

This photo was taken at Shellharbour Australia, which is about 50 miles south of Sydney. Cirrus built 1,800 SR-20s 1999. 

Pictures

Tsar Bomba

Donald Sutherland in Kelly's Heroes

Corsairs over San Diego

Sarah Gillis playing the violin in zero-G

B-24 & B-17 over Golden Gate Bridge

Matchbox Cars
What does 2'4 mean?

Reliefs of Indonesian history at Indonesian National Monument

A-10 Warthog

The Razorback, Port Campbell National Park, Victoria, Australia
No, those white blobs are not houses. Nobody lives there.

Roadkill's 56 Chevy & Mount Shasta

Flying Squirrel

Sugar Glider
NA Daily

Cool. Seems like I'm always hearing about flying squirrels, but I don't think I've ever seen one other than the infamous Rocket J. Squirrel from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show and that doesn't really count, does it?

According to one of the comments, it's actually a sugar glider, not a flying squirrel. Wikipedia tells us that they are from southeast Australia. They are very similar to flying squirrels.

Boy Swallows Universe

Boy Swallows Universe | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
2024 Phoebe Tonkin, Travis Fimmel

 

Life and times of a couple of teenage boys and their dysfunctional parents. Pretty great stuff. Cast of characters:

• Eli, a precocious 13-year-old boy,
• Gus Bell, his silent older brother
• Frances 'Frankie' Bell, their mum, a recovering heroin addict, separated from their father
• Robert Bell, an alcoholic.
• Lyle, who has taken up with Frankie and is providing a home for her and the boys. He has a steady job, but he's dealing heroin at a wholesale level to make some extra scratch. He works in a prosthetics factory run by
• Tytus Broz who throws a party for his employees at a restaurant run by 
• Bich Dang who is also wholesaling heroin to people like Lyle. Her son
• Darren Dang, a wanna-be samurai, goes to school with Eli.
• Slim Halliday, an ex-con and friend of Lyle and his family. Lives in a trailer down by the river.
• Alex Bermuda, a convict in prison and Eli's pen pal.
• Ivan Kroll, villain, suffered damage to his face from a shotgun blast and wears a prosthetic from Broz's prosthetics factory.

We watched three episodes tonight and mistakes have been made and bad things are starting to happen. Corruption is pervasive in the police force, Tytus is beginning to look shady.

P. S. Soundtrack here. There were a couple of tunes that caught my ear. Most of it I've never heard. Some of it might be okay.

Update November 2025 replaced missing video.

Australia versus the Moon

Purnululu National Park

This morning's jigsaw puzzle. While technically Purnululu National Park is in Western Australia, it is closer to the northern edge. It is about 400 miles SSW of Darwin. (Google Map)

Coincidentally, I heard someone (Neil deGrasse Tyson maybe) comparing the diameter of the Moon to the size of Australia. Looking for a picture to illustrate this, I came across this 3D poster which gives a better picture of the situation than a simple 2D map.

Australia versus the Moon

Moon Versus Moon

Our Moon is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System. Three of the larger moons (Ganymede, Callisto and Io) are in orbit around Jupiter, one orbits Saturn (Titan). Our Moon is larger than the fourth Galilean moon (Europa).

Moons of Mars

Mars has two known moons, Phobos and Deimos ("fear" and "dread", after attendants of Ares, the Greek god of war, equivalent to the Roman Mars). 

Fear and Dread? Excellent! I'm going to look for an opportunity to deploy that factoid. 

The Stranger | Official Trailer | Netflix

A little creepy, a little ominous, it's not told in a coherent manner, bits and pieces appear sporadically.

It's a little confusing because our guy Henry is apparently recruited into a criminal organization, though just what kind of criminal activity they are involved in is never made clear. Maybe gun running, maybe they help people disappear, kind of like reverse witness protection. Then I'm reading the Wikipedia page and it sounds like the entire 'criminal enterprise' is a facade set up to gain Henry's confidence enough that he willingly confesses his crime. Wikipedia calls it the Mr. Big Procedure.

Cardboard Drones

Aussie company SYPAQ develops cardboard drones for defence of Ukraine | 7NEWS
7NEWS Australia

Via Defence Blog. Meanwhile I can't remember whether defense is spelled with a c or an s.

Spin that Wheel

Pilatus PC21 of the Roulettes, the 6 aircraft display team of the Royal Australian Air Force

Seems like an apt name for a dangerous occupation. The PC21 is a military training aircraft made in Switzerland.

Troppo

Pretty great. Murder mystery set in Cairns in northeast Australia, which is well into the tropics. We've got crocodiles and venomous snakes and cast of oddball characters. The scene is reminiscent of Crocodile Dundee. And then we have people using snake venom like a recreational drug to get high. Sounds sketchy, but it might be a real thing. Shoot, knowing how weird people can be I'm sure it's a real thing somewhere.

The show got me to thinking about how lucky I am to have a family. I didn't see much of my family when I was in my twenties, but they were still there. People who don't have a family, or have a useless one, are going to have a much rougher time. Not sure what can be done about that. That's probably where cults get their members.

On Amazon FreeVee for free, but with ads. I don't know why it's not available without ads on Amazon Prime. There were only a couple of short ads in the first episode, as we go along there were more and longer ads. It got to be pretty obnoxious toward the end. They do post the amount of time remaining on the screen, which is nice.

The Nightingale

The Nightingale - Official Trailer I HD I IFC Films
IFC Films
Another movie about a right bastard of an English soldier. It wouldn't take very many like him to have the whole country up in arms against the English. From IMDB:

Set in 1825, Clare, a young Irish convict woman, chases a British officer through the rugged Tasmanian wilderness, bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence he committed against her family. On the way she enlists the services of an Aboriginal tracker named Billy, who is also marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past.

Our girl, the Nightingale, is hell bent on vengeance until she kills her first attacker. After that she loses  steam. She is never a super competent killer, she is running on pure emotion, so that was realistic. Not like an action thriller where the hero is successfully dispatching a string of villains one after another. The finale where the English soldier gets his is kind of a let down. Bang, the door opens, boom, Billy spears him right through the heart, poof, he's dead. Rather disappointing, really wanted to see him ground between two stones.

Billy is a little confusing. On one hand his English is perfect, which isn't surprising since he was brought up by the English. On the other hand, he is in an aborigine and I really don't know how they act. Every time I see them in a movie their behavior just seems weird.

Coulson Gets Around

Coulson Water Bomber in Australia - Jarrod Swanwick

Coulson is based in British Columbia, Canada. A C-130 Hercules has a range of about 2,000 miles. Australia is about 10,000 miles away, all over water, so I was wondering what route they took to get there. I mean there is more than one way to skin a cat (where did that expression come from anyway?), see this post and this video. I suppose they could have carried extra fuel in the cargo bay, but I don't know if they would have been able to carry enough to fly non-stop the whole way. 

Besides having a zillion aircraft photos, FlightAware also has flight logs for every aircraft in existence, so I thought I'd check. That log shows that this aircraft has been in Chile for at least the last month. So Coulson gets around.

Erickson Skycrane - Jarrod Swanwick

This photo was also in this weeks batch from FlightAware. Also from Australia by the same photographer. The Skycrane has appeared here a couple of times.

Wikipedia has a page about the Skycrane and the CH-54 Tarhe, the military version.

500 miles per unit time

SS Himalaya

Extract from a story about the disaster that has befallen the airline industry.

Back in the 1960s I was an officer aboard the SS Himalaya - SS meaning steam ship - and we circumnavigated the globe carrying passengers in an era before the Boeing 747 transformed things, allowing the masses to travel and not just the few. The photo shows us departing from Sydney, Australia, [. . .] 

In those days, trains were powered by steam too and they were the sole means of transport still in countries like Pakistan where planes had barely started to arrive. 

We used Pakistanis as assistants because they could be paid less than westerners. I did not speak much of their language and my assistant spoke little of mine. Sometimes we were at sea out of sight of land for days so seeing anything was an event. One day, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, we were working on deck and all the passengers suddenly rushed to the ship's rail. My assistant pointed up into the sky saying excitedly "look, Sahib, steam chicken". That steam chicken was a Boeing 707 towing a long white vapor trail en route to somewhere; a rare sight in those days. Our ship's speed was 500 miles per day, that Boeing did that in one hour!

The Sydney Opera House opened in 1973, the SS Himalaya was withdrawn from service in 1974.

Via Iaman