An opportunity to post anything and everything about Alouettes and Lamas.
The Lama is one of my favourite helicopters and .. while she looks as though she may have been designed by Frank Hornby, and though she shakes like a drunk in withdrawal, and despite the poor leg room of her rear-seat passengers, and even though she can't accommodate their baggage, yet .. for her size, her performance is dazzling .. and who, pray tell, can resist the exquisite shrill of her antique Artouste as it leaps into life - a call to flight for anyone within a kilometre of her frame!
And all this talk of Lamas reminds me of a little poem I once read, composed by a boy who had watched Lamas at work in the Italian Alps:
Lama dear lama, who can compare,
to your crane-like frame so rugged and bare.
A Meccano construction of Perspex and tin,
you even can fly, while lacking a fin!
Some in disdain have called you a ‘bug’,
little they know, you are more like a tug!
To others who stare, you seem incomplete,
till you haul man and ware, to ten thousand feet!
“A collection of tubes which both shake and do rattle”,
says he who has never seen you in battle.
Take heart lovely Lama, and pay them no heed,
for you are a contraption most splendid indeed.
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