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Editorial
Issue 06 to be re-published on Friday 29 December 2000

This is now time for the fifth prototype of Aircraft Pictorial and probably you saw that the GAZETTE word in the title let room to the ALBUM one, a direct consequence about the fact that you prefer pure pictures, texts having relatively no importance. As written by a sincere amateur of pictures delivered by the Gazette " We have nothing to do with your comments about French Army or French flight units...publish your photographs...it's enough to come!!!". I may agree with this crude compliment , we are now into a civilisation where pictures and sex have preponderence over words and ideas, where people use pictures to transform the truth and so write their truth possibly for the benefit of other people but rather for their death...

To be short, I admitted than texts surely were better for books but I also told him that I found no interest to follow quite a thread about Tomcats becoming just good for bus stop with the dramatic increase of seats available... To see childish products is very sympathetic but this is not aviation and cannot compare with all those, in the binaries aviation and military groups, who are bringing original contributions either by their pictures, either by the authoritative comments they produce after publication of such or such picture or by very nice painstaking and interesting explanations for all those asking to understand more about the most fantastic and interesting activity in the history of mankind.

Well, with minor redesign, this is the last part of my beloved French 25F Flotille's Neptunes. An All Colour after the previous All Black...and white. During fifteen days I tried to understand a little of super mysteries !!! of slides and negs scanning in order to get you an idea not of the Neptunes, we all know, but rather of the pure beauty of lights and sea colours existing in French Britanny. I tell lights because these pictures were done during several flights at different dates and e.g., during a sortie over a quite restricted maritime area, I could appreciate flight conditions ranging from pure blue sky to full IFR global grey when radioaltimeter and search radar became, for pilots, the " Boss " of our God of the Sea and prevent us to remove masts of the surrounding ships... so low we were over the grey-brown quiete water rushing from mist between my legs when installed in the glazed nose observer seat...!!!

Enjoy...without captions but two: The First and the Last... I hope you remember this title...!!!

JMJ Lefebvre