A little thread to explain a little of how that other account came about...

Several years ago I was bored of seeing certain accounts on Twitter post photos of aircraft (that they hadn't taken) with text that was just rubbish

The accounts were just doing it to be popular and after a couple of them had used some of my pics with captions that were completely made up i thought I'd start mocking them a bit.

1 of the accounts posted one of my pics of a Hurricane, so I replied with "I think you'll find that is a Spitfire" to interupt their thread of adoration from planespotters counting rivets on the photo and congratulating them on posting a photo that wasn't theirs and made up words

My little comment exploded, 50 odd ranting replies later the account deleted the post. I found this quite funny... firstly that the account didn't like it, secondly that a wrong identification infuriated plamespotters who clearly took looking at a photo on twitter very seriously

I also found that the account blocked me, so I did the same sort of thing to a few other accounts that were posting pics that weren't theirs and with BS comments to get their likes. It worked every time and... they all blocked me :-)

So I thought I'd start posting the photos myself, identify the aircraft badly and make up a complete BS bit of text to go with it, it would be a bit of fun...

At this point I decided that to make it "work" I'd have to set a few rules for myself or It would all go horribly wrong. They were things like...

Never be rude to anyone, as nobody enjoys being caught out by a joke.

Make every fact in the post utter rubbish

And that every aircraft had to be identified wrong! It is basically naming it as a different aircraft that it slightly resembles, close enough that it can be a mistake but wrong enough to attract the rivet counters.

In my little head I remembered back to a conversation I'd had with a Sgt of mine when I was in a Forensics unit and he was my boss... we'd seen a plane go over and I only caught a glimpse of it and asked him if it was a Harrier? He replied "how should I know!"

I asked him if he knew what it was and he didn't, he was an itter legend and a very very funny guy, full of super quick one liners. I asked him if he knew what aircraft the RAF had...

His reply was "All I need to know is that if the front is spinning its a Spitfire, if the top is spinning its a Chinook and if its arse is on fire its a Tornado" :-)

And so this formed the basis of the plane recognition for my tweets. I did them on this account for a few years and the planeapotters would go loopy! Most had a rant and then realised it was a joke, some just didn't get it at all. And some were just really nasty about it

This ended up with a few threats from planespotters that if they ever met me they'd punch me or beat me up (good luck with that) and then one particular muppet contacted my work and demanded that I be sacked as I'd made him look stupid on Twitter

Then the same muppet posted my contact details on a Facebook group and I got lots of ranty phonecalls and emails at work (don't worry, he was dealt with and won't be doing it again).

At the same sort of time I kept seeing that "Only photo ever taken of Concorde..." appearing and noticed that not just with planes but with all topics, some people post all sorts of BS on social media and far too many people believe it without checking any of the facts

So to keep the abuse away from me and to continue the fun and to highlight not to believe what you read on social media so easily thst other account was created.

This is also the reason I block anyone who mentions me in with that other account ;-)