T
here’s a moment in
the 1996 Star Trek
time-travel movie ‘First
Contact’ where Captain
Picard (played by Sir
Patrick Stewart) reaches out to
touch the ‘Phoenix’, the fi rst warp
drive ship and is asked by the
android Lt. Commander Data
(Brent Spiner) whether tactile
contact alters his perceptions
of the object. Picard replies that
touch can connect a person to an
object, make it seem more real –
alas all that the purely mechanical
Data can “feel” are imperfections
in the titanium casing.
I was minded of this scene
recently on two consecutive fi eld
trips, one to the West Somerset
Railway (WSR) the other to the
Tank Museum at Bovington in
Dorset. In both instances it wasn’t
quite all about making a physical
connection – least not where
there are working steam trains
on an active line! – but more the
value of being in the presence of
such objects and getting a greatersense of them by sight, sound and
oddly, smell.
In the case of West Somerset
Railway, the hiss and smell of
steam is quite something and
I can understand why people
become enamoured with the
subject matter – more anon. With
the Tank Museum the fi rst thing
that hits you once you leave the
fresh Dorset air of the car park
is that aroma of oil, grease and
metal. Before you’ve even seen
a tank the senses are already
processing information and
feeding the imagination. The
same goes for most aviation
museums I’ve ever visited too.
As far as that tactile moment,
being able to appreciate – where
permissible by the museum -
the surface texture of an object
cannot be underestimated. Like
that moment in ‘First Contact’ it
does connect you with an object
in a very personal way. Back
in 2012 on a pre-Scale Model
World visit to the RAF Museum at
Cosford on the Friday afternoon,I came face to face with XX765,
their ACT Jaguar. Now my love of
the ‘Jag’ goes right back to when
it was fi rst entering service in
the early 1970s, the rakish lines
epitomised just what a jet should
look like (at least to a six-year-
old) and it was further fuelled by
adverts and articles in my sole
copy of Air Pictorial I had at the
time. And then there were the
kits, fi rstly the Airfi x GR1 with its
iconic Roy Cross artwork of a 54
Squadron Jaguar leaping out of
the box top as bombs explode
in the background, and then the
Matchbox kit with Roy Huxley’s
painting of (again) a 54 Squadron
aircraft screaming down the
runway on full afterburners with
a full compliment of missiles and
rockets. Suffi ce to say I’ve built
and collected a few Jaguar kits
down the years and had seen
the aircraft numerous times at
airshows both fl ying and in the
static display, but I’ve never
actually been up close to one to
the point that, like Picard, I couldtrace the rivets under my fi ngers.
As corny as it sounds, just having
that connection suddenly brought
a fl ood of memories back of how
much that aircraft meant – still
means – to me. I was forty-fi ve at
the time but could have been fi ve,
such was the sense of wonder.
I have similar experiences
whenever I see Concorde – and
it’s telling that the British always
tend to refer to it in the singular
rather than “a Concorde”. We
have two examples in the West
Country, prototype 002 at the
Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton
and the fi nal fl ying service aircraft
G-BOAF at the newly opened
Aerospace Bristol. My connection
with the aircraft was started when
I rushed home from school for
lunch to watch the live split-
screen coverage on the news
of the fi rst commercial fl ights by
British Airways and Air France in
January 1976. A few weeks later I
saw the real thing – my maternal
grandparents had a farmhouse
on the Heathrow fl ight line inA NIGHT AT
THE MUSEUM
6 MODEL AIRPLANE INTERNATIONAL - August 2019Jonathan Mock looks at the value of visiting preserved collections of historic machines...
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