Just when you got used to navigating around the Vintage Wings website, we went and changed it all…for the better!
From the Vintage News files online by Dave O'Malley.
When the Supermarine Spitfire Mk I was first introduced into service in the summer of 1938, pilots were delighted with its performance, looks and firepower. It was the best of the best and R.J. Mitchell's beauty gave England and the RAF the perfect weapon at the very time they needed it most.
But then came the Spitfire Mk II, the Mk V, Mk IX, Mk XVI and many more - as many as 24 Marks in all and many sub-variants - all with improvements in power, speed, altitude, firepower and range. So perhaps the Mk I was not the be-all and end-all pilots first thought. Was it possible that something so great could, in fact, be greater?
Yes indeedy! So when I tell you that next week we will be launching an all New Vintage Wings Website, keep this in mind. Consider it Vintage Wings 2.0 or if you follow my Spitfire metaphor, Vintage Wings Mk II. Many of you over the past fours years have told me that the Vintage Wings website is one of the best in the business (I particularly love those folks who insist that it IS the best in the business), so why in God's name, make any change at all? The reasons are many.
Firstly, and most importantly, the present site is in English only. We live in Québec, half of our volunteer base is French Canadian, some of our pilots and mechanics are French Canadian, we live in a bilingual country, and more than half of our visitors to the hangar and to our air shows are French
Canadians. Finally, and most compellingly, we honour heroic Canadians who have populated our rich aviation heritage - it's our mandate. Many of them are French speakers - Omer Levesque, Louis Geffrion, Fern Villeneuve and Arthur Fecteau to name a few. We honour them in both official languages.
Our new website will employ many modern social media formats such as Twitter and Facebook to reach an ever widening audience of young people. For anyone over 55 this may a head scratcher, but for Flight Lieutenant Justin Beiber it's the cat's patoutie. In addition there will be up-to-date news feeds from the blogisphere (recently discovered Dr. Arianna Huffingtion somewhere between the stratosphere and the troposphere) and from mainstream media. Vintage Wings Mk II will be brighter, more photographic, more visual, more dynamic and searchable. Vintage Wings Mk II will continue to carry all the old weekly news stories (220+) from the past 4 years and from this point on will offer new stories in French and English (though they might not be simultaneous).
There will be many new dynamic links that will take you to the specialty program sites of Vintage Wings such as Wings over Gatineau, Hawk One, Yellow Wings and Gray Ghosts. The site that you will come to in the next short while will be much, much more visual and exciting. It will eventually have more content, videos, links and key word "searchability".
Read more at www.vintagewings.ca
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