Nice pictures Davex. Flight decks are not the easiest places to take pictures.

The red buttons are not normally too bad. The ones to watch are the yellow and black ones, especially when they are attached to the chair you are sitting on.

Useless Concorde fact:- the fourth picture shows the engineer's station. At full speed and height the airframe got hot and expanded and a gap of about one inch appeared between the rear of the panel (Right hand side as shown in the photo) and the box next to it. On a couple of occasions, engineers have put their peaked caps in the gap forgotten to remove them, and once back on the ground were unable to do so.

I have had a signed for letter pushed through the door with a note written on it saying "signed for by postie".

In their latest incarnations both have OS and HSM even in Pentax fit apparently. The 50-500 seems to have lost it's EX rating so things may have changed.

I had trouble with this site earlier, but not others.

I worked for British Caledonian for a while and they were part owned by BA, so we got their staff travel discount. You had to be their for a year before you qualified for it. Then as the year was nearly up we found out that BA were selling their interest in BCal. We would qualify for the discount for six days.

We got on the phone to the staff travel office and asked what was the most expensive flight they had and were told it was Concorde to new York. We immediately booked three seats. (At the time I was broke so I couldn't afford the flight even at 90% off, but I certainly couldn't afford not to take it.)

So the afternoon of April 6th 1992 found me in the Concorde lounge at Heathrow. We all arrived about three hours early and got stuck into the food (Egon Ronay IIRC) and champagne. I commented that one of the people in the lounge looked a bit like Henry Kissinger, but one of my friends said that it could not be. A while later someone started walking toward him and several large men with bulges in their armpits stood up.

The flight was something else. The initial feeling on sitting down was that the seats were quite firm. Then the Captain hit the loud levers and we found out why. The acceleration was awesome and we would have simply sunk into ordinary seats.

At full altitude, the sky is a much darker blue than it is on the ground (we were half way to space). The windows were very small but if you looked out of three windows on the other side of the fuselage you could see the curvature of the horizon. The temperature gauge showed the air outside was at -60 deg C but when you touched the windows they were hot due to friction with the air.


(The toilets were very cramped though :roll

Thicket?

You probably wont need the 12-24 for the interior anyway, it's suprisingly small inside. (Go on - ask me how I know.)

From my own experience I'd take John to task on one point, I'd go for the 55-300, then take a lot of picture and check what lengths you actually use.

As to the Sigma 150-500, it's just got a lot more complicated.

I have had a few reasonable results with my old 150-500, but I had always suspected that the Bigma (50-500)had a better IQ. now, both lenses have been updated so who knows?

Personally I would not be without the DA*50-135.

Pete - you are missing a [ before the first IMG. Maybe one of the Mods could correct this.