If you think that your Photographs and other information on the internet are there forever, think again! It is estimated that 40% of the early internet has now disappeared, that doesn’t take into consideration the thousands of Bulliten Boards and other interest groups that used private servers before that.

Any information or media that you post in places like Facebook or Flickr will go west at some point, you can be certain of it. As far as the internet is concerned, almost none of it is archived. Where you have a paid for service, well it will only exist as long as it is proffitable and paid for.

What information has been lost, well my bookmarks quite often come back with a page not found message – but then I have bookmarks going back to the early 90’s. So it is hardly a surprise that a number of these sites have gone, but it is concerning – especially when you know that what you are looking for was on that page.

I know many people have an aversion to using the resources on the internet for research, but in many cases the information on the internet will outlive the official information. The data retained by airports, safety bodies, air traffic control, airlines and other bodies that hold aviation data – is no longer on paper. With the associated costs of storing legacy data or migrating it to newer systems, the data is no longer preserved in the same way as it was.

It’s not been that uncommon seeing float equiped aircraft at Ashaig, here are three from the same company all in different liveries.  All three have been pretty common visitors over the years, with the Cutty Sark livery being quite short lived as a result of a BBC requirement. I do have some pictures of it just in the plain yellow scheme, I’ll maybe ammend the post a bit later.

The company Loch Lomond Sea Planes made a number of attempts to organise pleasure flights both from Ashaig and Portree, but from the conversations that I had with the people associated with the venture they weren’t a great success.

The dining flights that they did were much more viable, but they now have the same Covid-19 problems as everybody else. The recovery from this is likely to take long and weary, it may well be that the post Covid world is pretty similar to the during Covid world with sporadic lock downs etc…

Many people I’m sure would like to see an air service return to Skye, there have been several lines of investigation into how feasible it all is. However I can say from my time living there that the local MP didn’t even acknowledge my communications and that was before he was the Westminster leader of the SNP.

I have heard figures for the requirements for the development of the airport, but to be truthful there needs to be significant work done. With a 770m runway, the list of suitable aircraft is a bit restricted.

Having now moved from Skye, I don’t actually have a serious leaning one way or the other now in respect of an air service. But I can honestly say that I wish I hadn’t had to do the 800,000 miles of driving over time I lived there.

Plockton isn’t an airfield regularly associated with the military, but over the 20 or so years that I have been a regular visitor – so has the military. They visit much less frequently now than they did when I first visited, but they still make regular visits.

The visits used to coincide with the BUTEC range days, it was pretty decent when there were 200 plus range days a year – but now I understand that there are less than 50 range days a year.

What could be seen there, well regular visits from the Army and Navy rotary wing contingents and now and again there would have been a Harrier although they didn’t land they came to the hover short of the runway and then departed again.

Second hand I’ve been told that an F-35 has visited, performing the same manouver as the Harrier – but that was by the same person who said they had seen a Unicorn outside the Pub, so classified as a maybe.

What types have I seen on the ground, Lynx, Puma, Griffin, Scout, Sea King and Merlin from memory. I’m pretty sure that there will other types, I missed a couple of H-60’s arriving about 30 seconds after they had departed.

So if I’m ever back up in that neck of the woods, I’ll be making a point of visiting Plockton – as you never know what will be in, especially at lunch time.

So with ninety something days to go, what will COP26 bring – well other than herds of plane spotters. There are supposed to be some 200 countries in attendance, providing thousands of delegates. I’m not sure that that all fits in well with the objective of the conference, but I will be glad to see a reasonable selection of aircraft in the event that the delegates arrive by air.

I would expect the distribution of visiting aircraft to be spread over the three major central belt airports, but I guess that you can never be sure on that score.

As to the plane spotters and the photographers, I’m expecting a surpluss of them to attend. I expect that there will be people from all over the country, hoping to log or photograph some interesting visitors.

What will COP26 achieve, I seriously doubt it will achieve very much. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the politicians will tell us all how much of a sucess it has been, regardless of the outcome of the whole thing.

I think that there can be little or no doubt that there is climatic shift in the UK, it seems to be pretty marked in other parts of the world as well. So our generation and the preceeding generations have screwed things up, the generation that will have to fix it has been home schooled by a bunch of alcoholics – I expect it all to go pretty well then!

An earlier post and a followup conversation has prompted me to look a bit further into what aviation information has been lost from the online world. There were a number of dedicated BBS devoted to aviation in general, these were more popular in the USA but there were a number in the UK and Europe.

With the advent of USENET and some of the other services like Compuserve, the BBS slowly fell out of favour. The bulk of the information on the BBS servers has gone, few were backed up to anywhere accessible and many were just turned off and forgotten about.

So how serious a loss is this? To put things in perspective, I started using BBS services in the late 70’s and there was a wealth of information and knowledge on these services – although sometimes not easy to find.

The people who contributed to the knowledge base, they were people who had actually been there in a number of cases and they were pretty passionate about the information that they held. But few of the BBS services were moved to services like USENET, although some people did cross post.

There were BBS servers with very specific groups, covering subjects as diverse as US fighter aircraft in Europe. All the way up to current (well current until the advent of the internet) aviation activities, the community was very helpful and many people were members of multiple services.

Sorry to say I think that much of the information and many of the people are now and forever lost in the mists of time.