The post-modern airplane

We wondered what all the banging around in the Toolshed was about, and now we have discovered.  Young Keith has built himself a post-modern airplane.

After the rocket made from pallets and powered by a barbecue, Keith had been inspired by the thoughts of creating new and exciting vehicles.  We think he over-reached himself here.  After all, building a rocket's not rocket science.  You get a tube, fill it with something explosive and shoot the explosion out of one end.  As my niece would say, "Simples."

But an airplane is different.  We've all seen the diagrams - the arrows indicating the air flow as they hit the leading edge, spiralling above and below the wing and creating, in some way too complex for my mind, a lifting effect.  You have to balance the yin of gravity with the yang of lift, and all the while keeping hold of the fundamental ability to turn left and right.

But Young Keith insists that by taking a post-modern view, he is freeing himself from the constraints of aerodynamics.  He says he is deconstructing what we mean by a plane.  He points out that those curly lines representing airflow don't actually exist - they are a social construct.  And therefore in a post-modern and ironic way he's build his plane out of pallets.  He likes pallets.

I've seen what I can only describe as Keith's death trap.  My only hope is that the Mini Metro engine he's wedged into the front, and onto which he has taped a propellor, has rusted up in just the same way all the rest of the Metros used to.  If he gets that thing moving, I advise all Beaker Folk and inhabitants of Husborne Crawley to head for the hills.

I don't know much about post-modernism, but when it comes to airplanes I'll go for one that's been built by an engineer.  There's one thing round here that's definitely ripe for deconstruction, and it's made out of pallets.