First photo of Comac C919 (model)

All a bit of fun of course, but models and artist's impressions can have odd consequences. I was at a press conference in about 1992 when British Aerospace unveiled the proposed twin deriviative of the RJ family. In the slightly dodgy drawings the nacelles were distinctly flattened at the bottom leading to wild rumours that it was already decided that it would be CFM56-powered. Not true, and all came to nothing anyway.

Heavily updated after refreshing my memory: Then there was the Navy League Air Force Association show in Washington about the same time. Nobody knew what the planned, and hugely controversial Air Force version of the A-12 naval strike fighter looked like. I went into the Lockheed General Dynamics booth to chat to the PR folks and to my astonishment there was a model of it hanging from the ceiling. It was a finless-pure delta design - quite astounding. With the PR guy's agreement I sprinted off to find a photographer and literally hired a woman snapper who I had never met as she walked among the exhibits.

By the time I got back to the booth a USN admiral had heard about the model and ordered Lockheed GD to hide it forthwith. The Navy would decide when and how to reveal the configuration was not amused by having the first A-12 model unveiled at an Air Force show, he told them. So my exclusive was stillborn (not the only one.) Within a year Dick Cheney had finally lost his sense of humour with the Pentagon and its then staggeringly arrogant contractors and cancelled the programme. He and I would have little common ground politically today, but it was a fine thing he did.

Also about the same time the whole world was desperate to see any kind of artist's material of the YF-22 and YF-23 stealth fighters which were built, but unrevealed. Lockheed went first with the YF-22 and released their own artist-s impression of the beast which, remember, was supposed to be the stealthiest thing in the sky. The image was duly released and published all over the place.

To my secret pleasure I learned a few months later that a mid-ranking Lockheed PR, who went onto greater things, had taken it upon himself to get the artist to add a couple of utterly imagined foreplanes. None of the world's alleged stealth experts (which certainly didn't include me) commented on this bizarre configuration. The F-22 went onto greater things too of course, and needless to say never did have foreplanes.