How could I resist the temptation? I just had to post it a day early! Partly this was for debugging purposes. I’d made so many changes to the site – new menus, the Extras page, the Forum — that putting it up early to spend extra time making sure everything worked seemed like the responsible thing to do. But I must confess that another motive was impatience. I wanted to see what the thing looked like. In particular, I wanted to see how that Armstrong-Whitworth control car came out. That thing was hard to research. There are plenty of pictures, but most are small and blurry, some are contradictory, and the actual control car of the R-33 — on display at the RAF museum in London — doesn’t seem to entirely resemble some of the contemporary press photographs. (Perhaps they made some changes after the photographs were taken. Or perhaps the one in London was a spare. They might have had a large collection of control cars in a shed somewhere, each with a slightly different color and design, to use depending on their mood. “Let’s try the blue one today,” they might have said, “the one with the chaise lounge next to the tea table. Actress Louise Brooks is coming for a publicity tour, and she looks good in blue.” But I digress.)
There was also the matter of Captain Everett and his companions. With so many questions unanswered, they couldn’t just sit around the Cairns Royal Air Station waiting for something to turn up. So now they’re off, and the story has begun! I hope you all enjoy it, I look forward to your comments and suggestions, and if you do spot any bugs in the new site, let me know so I can pass them on the Jenkins.
