Pilot Magazine (published mid-December 2006)

A CLEVER AND evocative film, ingeniously interweaving the two-week servicing of a B757 by ATC Lasham Ltd with archive WWII material from the Imperial War Museum, along with brief reconstructions worthy of a BBC costume drama, plus engaging, never-too-long tales from local residents, a visiting Dutch veteran, and clips of the modern North Hampshire airfield which is renowned for its gliding.

All this rich mixture is sensitively and skillfully handled. And the script gently informs but lets the pictures and the people, speak for themselves.

After my lavish praise, you may be surprised to learn that this is in fact a great public relations job for the maintenance company, and a subtitle could be Servicing a B757 but that becomes not a minor but a totally absorbing, parallel story, side by side and criss-crossing with the construction of the field during WWII and the subsequent operations. When you have a director bold enough to open his film with a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, you are prepared for something special.

The misty arrival over rural scenes of the airliner to be serviced quickly moves on to excellent quality 1939 film of constructing runways equivalent in volume of concrete to building a road from England to Australia. Then it is back to the hangar for inspections inside the 25-foot-high tail, crawling though impossibly small spaces, with glimpses and snippets of information you hardly realize you are absorbing about cables, fatigue, corrosion, and the man-hours taken in the two-week servicing. Fascinating.

Then there are ghost stories from the village pub, less romantic recollections from Service personnel, and the harsh statistics of losses.

The interweaving reaches a bewildering, enjoyable and emotional climax as genuine black-and-white archive film fades into recreated black-and-white scenes and this in turn is replaced by a reconstruction in colour. This is skilful stuff all the more so when linking modern engineering thoroughness with a sixty-year-old story of war, without jarring our sensibilities. This technique of scripting could all have gone so horribly wrong but it has been handled in a masterly fashion. (I am reminded of Lindbergh’s later autobiographical book of his transatlantic flight during which he tells his life story in flashbacks as if remembered from the cockpit of the Spirit of St Louis while above the Atlantic.)

If ATC Lasham Ltd services aircraft as well as Mr. Tobias makes film, then they can be proud of their efforts and the aptness of the Saint-Exupéry quote is worthy of a poet or this film-maker: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Tony French. Editor / Pilot Magazine