Speedbird 747.com boac.wmv
Welcome to the world of Ian Middleton
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World War Two
A Statistic of War is dedicated to Teddy Davis, my dad’s cousin, who joined the RAF in 1939 as a boy apprentice. By 1942 he had become a flight engineer on Lancaster bombers but was killed when his aircraft was shot down over Germany in 1943.
To Arms! Dad was in the Territorial Army and volunteered for the Regular Army in 1939. He served in several theatres of the war including Dunkirk and North Africa. This is his story told in his own words.
First Great Western
FGW Downloads. During my time working as a train guard I’ve used my desktop publishing experience to create reference documents. There’s a lot to know and remember and I like to have that info with me in compact form. These documents are available for download to railway professionals only.
Trail Riding
Trail Riding is off-road cycling on natural trails such as bridleways and byways. I usually carry a camera and record some of the beautiful scenery on my rides. I get out about 6 days a month and as I love being out in the countryside it refreshes me mentally as well as physically.
Wild Africa
Wild Africa is a collection of wildlife photos that I took in the 1990s. During that decade I made many visits to the South African lowveld and these are the best of hundreds of photos that I took.
Andy Millar is the pen man. His love of wood shows itself in the pens that he crafts by hand. He creates many different styles and all are individually styled depending on the attributes of the material he uses.
The Pen Man
Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator is a PC game that’s been around for about 25 years. I don’t play it as often as I’d like but I keep my hand in for rainy days when I retire. I’ll add a page of screenshots and videos at a later date but meanwhile this is a video I took of me landing a Boeing 707 at Hong Kong’s famous and dangerous old Kai Tak airport. The video is a bit jerky which is caused by the video capture program using a lot of RAM. The gameplay is usually smooth. This is the old version of FS, FS2004.
Compare it to this
1970 BOAC Television advert
01/02/12: hosting24
Speedbird 747.com and the other websites in the group are constantly being updated. Dunno why. Some of them are useful and some are interesting and some of them are just showcases for my interests. Anyway, I enjoy building them and showing them off.
They’ve been created in Serif WebPlus X5 and for some of them this is their third reincarnation as I’ve become more proficient and learnt more powerful software. If you have any comments or find any broken links please email me at
 webmasteratspeedbird747.com (replace at with @)
About
WebPlusX5
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Filezilla FTP
Mozilla Firefox
Google Chrome
It’s not really a site about aeroplanes
Speedbird is the call sign for British Airways flights, inherited from it’s forerunner, BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation).
I joined BOAC as a steward in 1972 and retired as a Cabin Service Director on Boeing 747s 30 years later - hence the connection.
Kitesurfer. A wonderful BA advert with quite a twist!
Links
A random selection of useful and amusing sites
 to while away your time
You knew that dormice hibernate, right?
 Did you know that they snore?
First Great Western

 A couple of changes to make the PDF documents easier to view on smartphones or tablets. The two A5 booklets now have A4 options to make them easier to read digitally