tealin | Cabin Pressure Advent: Edinburgh

Well, the picture on the rugby went all funny, so Douglas said I should shin up onto the roof and twiddle the aerial … only now I’m here, I can’t seem to find it.

I thumbnailed this a while ago but couldn’t draw it till I looked up some reference. An afternoon shopping for vintage executive jets and holding them up to my mental image of Gertie led me to the HS-125, which happened to be photographed almost exactly like my thumbnail.

During the first season it's not really clear what sort of plane Gerti is, aside from a jet – her size seems to vary according to the needs of the episode. As the series goes on, we learn these things about her:
- 16 seats
- 2 engines
- Bits keep falling off and malfunctioning
- Douglas calls her a 'memento mori' next to a shiny new Gulfstream
- She's identified as a Lockheed McDonnell 312
- She belonged to Mr Shappey, Arthur's dad and Carolyn's ex, presumably second ex given her name.

My logic is as follows:

She obviously has to be out of date, and look dated as well. Mr Shappey is very fond of her and wants her back, so he probably took care with the purchase at the time. We know he's not short of money so either she was top-of-the-line at the time or a particularly exciting vintage. If we assume he bought Gerti around the time Arthur was born (late enough to be married to Carolyn, early enough they wouldn't have divorced yet) then that puts the purchase in the late 1970s. The first private jets were made in the 1950s, which is not quite long enough before that to be cool retro, so I'm assuming she was new in the '70s. This means she would still be uncool and look dated now, as opposed to a fascinating artefact of aviation history, is old enough to be falling apart, and from an era not particularly noted for the quality of its engineering and craftsmanship.

I looked up McDonnells from the 70s but all the ones I found were too big and too modern-looking. I decided to take the stated make as a red herring because those manufacturers were never merged, and are linked here because they provided the names for the two main characters (Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas). I opened up the search to all 16-seat private jets from the 1970s and lo, the HS-125 appeared. Hawker-Siddeley was a British company, which works well narratively, and look at that thing, it's a dinosaur all right. (Mr Finnemore didn't give a definitive answer as to whether the plane was named after Gertie the Dinosaur, but being an animator I always assumed she was, especially with the running gag of her decrepitude, and he has enough animation references it's not outside the bounds of probability ...) So it was just a matter of nibbling away at a few things to simplify and make it look a little newer than 1971 et voilà, Gerti!

I was wrong about the placement of the hyphen in the call letters so I diddled it in Photoshop. God bless whoever invented the clone stamp. I am available to airbrush former friends out of parties for a very competitive rate.