Major Project - My History of Planes and my Family.

Apparently when I was a very toddler, I couldn't understand that I wouldn't be able to fit inside of toy vehicles, like I would try to get inside of a toy car or plane on the, even though only my foot would have maybe fit inside. 

For the longest time I can remember I have held great interest in different vehicles, I had a very early onset obsession with trains I remember as I used to compulsively watch my one Thomas the Tank Engine VHS Tape the entire way through while repeating every single line of dialogue (before I could even talk) and when old VHS tapes would reach the end of the recording they would automatically rewind to the beginning and play the entire episode in reverse, at which point I have been told by my brother in law that I would repeat the entire reversed audio as it would play because I'd watched it so many times. One of my most vivid memories from when I was very young was when my dad took me to a steam train yard full of retired trains, and I remember being amazed by the scale of them.

After that my attention drifted to cars, both my parents were racing cars when I was born, my mum retired shortly after but dad kept going until I was about twelve. Because of this motorsport is a big interest in the family, cars to a lesser extent. I've always found myself drifting towards older cars though, something about the timelessness makes them eternally cool to me, and I still frequently watch historical races mostly featuring cars from the sixties and seventies and the racing is still great because the cars are so basic, it really comes down to driver skill and how they throw these machines around the corner at their limit.

My parents and my big sister before I was born

But of all vehicles I've found myself interested in, one has stood out and persisted for many years, I've always loved planes especially, I dont exactly know the origin of my interest of planes, from what I can piece together I can assume it was a co-effort from my Dad and Grandfather. When I was very young my dad would travel a lot for business so trips to Heathrow were frequent as we lived in London, being able to see the plane take off that you know someone's on is a weird experience, because when you're on the plane you don't really realise just how fast you take off and get altitude, you're gone so fast. Same for when you come back, this giant tube comes out of the sky and suddenly this person is just back somehow, a strong memory I have from one of these trips was when my dad was coming back from Ireland, so mum and I took pictures in a passport booth to give to him, and when he came out the terminal he gave me a replica model of the Aer Lingus plane I had just seen him come in on, to this day I remember how that model plane looked with a the four leaf clover on its tale.

My Grandfather has a great interest in historical aviation, primarily World War 2 war planes and early jet fighters, this reflected on my Dad as well as my Grandfathers favourite plane is the Spitfire (the plane that debatable won the war) and my Dads is the Electric Lightning, one of the most iconic early Jet Fighters.

The Electric Lightning (my Dads favourite plane)

My family originates from Dover so my Grandparents still lived there when I was younger, so I would stay with my Grandparents quite often. I remember the a room of my Grandparents house by the front door that was full of miscellaneous stuff and no one really went in there, but I remember seeing many framed photo's of paintings and pictures of planes and some old figures that undoubtedly belonged to my Grandfather. 

He would take me out in his car to some of the fields around Dover near the castle, I remember their being sheep in these fields that I was afraid of due to how many there were. But after he convinced me they weren't scary we would go in to fly the gliders and rubber band planes we had built before hand, some of them would go super high because of the strong winds near the coast, and when they got high enough it was almost like you're looking at a real plane, because you have no point of reference for size so its almost like watching a real spitfire fly over you.

I must have owned hundreds of these, such an iconic part of my youth.

There were some stories that my Grandfather told me and my Dad relating to the war, one was that when they were the Battle Of Britain film on location in Dover they needed a large fire for a Junker Dive Bomber prop to crash into, so they got my Grandads tire shop to make a large tire fire which my Dad helped with throwing tires into, and then they crashed the fake plane into it which features in the film.

But he had a really vividly cool story that he told us about when he was a child in the War that was evacuated in the rural area near Dover, he was sitting by a railway line and he was watching dog fights happening in the distance, but then he heard the infamous noise of the Doodlebug V1 rocket propelled bomb and spotted it flying over head in his direction, he mentioned feeling dread as he knew it wouldn't hit him but it was going somewhere and would cause serious damage. But then over the hum of the rocket engine he heard another louder sound building up, the roar of a Merlin V12 Rolls Royce engine, and only one vehicle sounded like that, from the clouds came a Supermarine Spitfire diving to gain speed in pursuit of the Doodlebug, prop planes weren't fast enough to catch up to the rocket propelled early missiles, so they had to dive to gain enough speed to keep up with them. 

V1 Doodlebug

So the Spitfire is now pulling up behind the V1 and gaining on it, one would assume the pilot would have then opened fire on the rocket and shot it down, but this could prove to be dangerous due to the intensity of the resulting explosion, but pilots had figured out an alternative method. The Spitfire pulled up to the V1 until it was almost touching it, almost in the burn of the rocket, and then started to look as if it was going to overtake it, so the rocket and the plane are side by side at this point. My grandfather then told me that what he saw next was the Spitfire use its wing tip to lift the wing of the V1 up, making it turn towards the ground, and as V1 didn't have a tail flap it couldn't recover from this action and started flying towards the ground near my Grandfather. 

The rocket hit a field near by and started sliding along the dirt, still propelled by rocket until it eventually hit the railway line near by and exploded, so in the end the V1 still caused damage and hindered the war effort by taking out a train route but that could be fixed relatively quickly and there was no loss of life. So this was undoubtably a very heroic act my Grandfather had witnessed and I can assume was a very large factor in his love of the war plane. After looking into the method that the Spitfire pilot used on the V1 I found out that they didn't actually touch the wing tip when they performed this, and they would actually just place the planes wing just underneath the rockets which would disrupt its airflow and cause it to spiral out of control as if it had been tipped.

Supermarine Spitfire

My Dad and Grandfather took my to a lot of air shows when I was younger, and in 2002 we were at one where a Vampire Fighter Jet crashed very close to us which was a little traumatic. But I still enjoy air shows and try to go to ones near by and visit air museums when i have the time. As I got older I would frequently find myself investing in airfix model kits of fighter planes I had seen in films and at air shows, something about being able to build this thing that I liked so much was just so appealing, like you'd produced something even though you were just following the instructions. I was always afraid of painting them though because I doubted my own abilities and didn't want to ruin something I loved so much so some times I just left them unpainted. But it was just being able to hold something that you only really see from afar, and investigate all the small details and see every panel that made up the plane that was so appealing to me. 

Today when ever I'm feeling a little down and out about something, or I'm just feeling like I have nothing to do but want to be productive ill usually get one of my old kits out I was too afraid to finish when I was younger as I have more confidence I can do them now, which is a nice feeling to be like, yeah I can do this and be able to put the finished model on my shelf. 

So finally before I came to university I originally wanted to be a pilot for an airline, so I had planned to join the RAF Cadets and start doing what I needed to get my pilots licence, but then I found out a short while later that I was colour blind, which prohibits me from being a pilot unfortunately. So instead I decided i wanted to design planes, so I started to work towards become an Aerospace engineer, so that I could also potentially work on the Aerodynamics on F1 cars, but when I got to college I found the process of designing them to be less about free form expression and design and way more about physics and maths, which I managed but found incredibly boring. But using the cad skills i learned on that course I decided to instead become a 3D modeler, so that I could design any planes I wanted and not have to worry too much about exact sciences, and potentially make planes for films or games based on my own designs or of historical ones, or maybe even fictional flying vehicles like the spinners from Blade Runner. So its almost like i'm still making my airfix but on computers, and I haven't looked back!

I was testing myself last week to see if I could remember how to draw a Spitfire without reference, I feel like I did a pretty reasonable job capturing the look of the specific features of the plane as to make it identifiable, so I feel comfortable in my ability to do full concept pieces featuring them.