The Little World

You can’t make this stuff up, folks. This Harvard was a part of an RCAF flight display team called ” the Goldilocks “. I believe they were sort of slow-speed comedy relief for air shows.

I agree with this. You need some variety at military displays. There can only be so much of the troops marching round about or the aerobatic pilots doing diamond passes and loops. I remember an Australian army display at Karrakatta that had SAS paratroopers leaping out of a plane and swooping down on the field. One swooped into the side of a barracks building and took out the air conditioner. No-one was disappointed.

But back to the Harvard. You can buy decal sets for this sort of thing, but you get them from Ottawa and pay a fortune in postage – far better to draw a few of the more exotic parts on the computer and print them out here. The clear decal sheet lets the underlying colour show through and if you set the ink dark enough you can get a fairly useful black letter or number.

The RCAF hot-air exhaust pipe is perfectly correct. Also the no-doors landing gear legs – this is a plane that has been preserved in a museum and pictures don’t lie. They might have misplaced the gear doors but that’s all right. I’ll follow suit.