Via @StarshipAlves at the It Was A Bird Once place: "Google has suspended drone courier flights because of raven attacks. Looks like the Ravens have taken our side against Skynet."
This not only made me laugh, it reminded me of something else - photos of a Spitfire intercepting a V-1 cruise missile in the 1944 sky over Southern England.
AFAIK those - from the Imperial War Museum - are the ONLY genuine photos of any Allied aircraft wing-tipping a buzz-bomb.
All others are faked, though it doesn't stop stuff like this:
That image, impossibly crisp for wartime air-to-air combat photography, was simply credit-cropped and grey-scaled without further use of filters or processing. Even so, "amazing shot" suggests it was not only posted as real but credulously accepted and reposted as such.
The original is this aviation art print, "Tipping Point" by Mark Donoghue...
...which many people interested in WW2 aviation would recognise, so any claim of reality came not just from a faker and liar but an INEPT faker and liar.
Lazy, too, because a few years ago I did this using Photomizer Retro, Vintager and BWorks, photo-manipulation programs which even back then were well past cutting-edge.
Shifting from colour to monochrome is just the first step.
Pictures from half a century or a century ago. showing situations where the action couldn't have been neatly posed and pin-sharp, need to look that way, and these are only halfway there.
The first image is another aviation art print, the second is a still from a simulation game, and I was doing it for fun, so spent only about 10 minutes on each.
Here's another of those real photos from the Imperial War Museum, taken AFAIK from the ground with a telephoto lens...
...and here's that crop of "Tipping Point" after a similar 10 minutes of low-grade-app tweaking.
Those two on the right already look more authentic than the original greyscale-only, and someone intending deliberate deception with an agenda like fake news / propaganda / scam ("recently discovered wartime photos for sale") etc.) would have spent far longer, with far better tools, and produced a far better result.
Be Aware!
*****
V-1 "doodlebugs" (so-called - also "buzz-bomb" - because of the droning noise made by its primitive pulse-jet engine) were so fast at +350 mph / 565 kph that wing-tipping was unusual and difficult.
It wasn't actual wing-to-wing contact, but flying close enough to disrupt the airflow and make the V-1 roll sideways. The gyro of its simple straight-and-level autopilot couldn't correct for this, and it crashed.
Most propeller fighters could only catch them after a dive and even pilots of really fast machines like the Tempest, Mosquito and Gloster Meteor (the RAF's first jet)...
...preferred using guns from dead astern.
Without a pilot to make evasive manoeuvres the target was a "sitter", but since its warhead was 850 kg / 1870 lb of high explosive and its fuel tanks weren't empty, making a successful hit from the optimum firing range of 250-300 yd / 230-275m was...
...an alarming experience.
Here's one Mosquito as it should be, and another after flying through the fireball of an exploding enemy bomber nailed with its full load still aboard. Detonating a V-1 would have had similar effects.
A wizard prang, as they used to say, followed by - despite probably being a bit hairy due to lack of rudder control - a great * landing.
*****
* Old aircrew saying, which goes something like this:
"A good landing is one where you can walk away from it; a great landing is one where you can fly the plane again later..."
Even though it'll need a bit of time in the shop, that Mozzie made an excellent landing.
:->
