People involved in aviation have always needed a sense of humour. The creativity of aeronautical humourists was apparent during the writing of last month's Flight Line, with the sheer number of derisive nicknames for British Aerospace's unfortunate ATP that sprang up during its short career. Originality is all well and good, but there are one or two aeronautical jokes that are too good not to reuse, and reused they are, relentlessly and seemingly without anyone getting tired of them. They can gain new elements over the years, too. The old, old "These Fokkers were Messerschmitts" canard used to be attributed to an unnamed Polish, or possibly Irish, pilot. More recently it was told as an anecdote about Douglas Bader, during a talk he was supposedly giving at a girls' school, just to add a little extra colour. It even made it into a piece in The Times on the anniversary of Bader's death. Needless to say, the line has nothing whatsoever to do with Bader - or at least it didn't until the comedian Stan Boardman used Bader as the subject when he told the joke on The Des O'Connor Show in the 1980s.
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