RAF Regiment 80/85 .Business 85/95 . Pub owner/ licensee 95/2012 , MUFC , Charity work , Astronomy and Elon Musk 👏 , Manchester United 👏, UK 🇬🇧 .UKRAINE.
Nth Wales coast .
Joined January 2019
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Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
Support our veterans, the very best of us.
Link to donate in the comments below.
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
Not even the German town of Neustadt am Rübenberge is safe from invader gangs running each other over.
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
Happy birthday to the comedy legend John Cleese
Have a great day 🎂🎂🎂🎂
@JohnCleese
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
Every time a German Messerschmitt pilot wanted to escape a Spitfire on his tail, he did the same thing.
He pushed the nose down.
In a dive, the German engine kept running — it used fuel injection. The British Spitfire's engine cut out. For one and a half seconds the Merlin went dead, the aircraft shuddered, and by the time it caught again the German was gone. Worse: if a German was behind a British pilot and the British pilot dove to escape, the German could follow and keep shooting while the British engine was silent.
Pilots were dying because of a carburetor.
The engineers at Farnborough knew about the problem. They were working on a long-term solution — a redesigned carburetor that would take years to perfect and manufacture.
A woman named Beatrice Shilling fixed it with a washer.
She was born in Hampshire in 1909 and was the kind of child who spent her pocket money on Meccano sets and tools. At fourteen she bought her first motorbike. Her mother, with the inspired instinct of someone who understood what her daughter actually was, found the Women's Engineering Society and arranged an apprenticeship at an electrical firm.
She went to Manchester University — one of the first two women ever to study engineering there — graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, stayed another year for a master's in mechanical engineering, and in 1936 joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough as a scientific officer.
By the late 1930s she was one of the best carburetor engineers in Britain. She was also one of only three women to hold the British Motorcycle Racing Club's Gold Star — awarded for lapping the Brooklands racing circuit at over 100 miles per hour on a motorcycle.
She had reportedly told her future husband, an engineer named George Naylor, that she wouldn't marry him until he earned his own Brooklands Gold Star first.
He earned it. They married in 1938.
The problem with the Merlin was specific and lethal. The SU carburetor used a float chamber to regulate fuel flow. Under negative g-forces — the forces experienced in a sudden dive — the fuel flooded to the top of the float chamber and starved the engine for 1.5 seconds. Just enough time for a German pilot to turn the tables entirely.
The RAF had known about this since the Battle of France. The formal solution — a redesigned pressure carburetor — was in development but wouldn't be ready for years.
Shilling was thirty-one years old, working in carburetor research, and she designed a fix in weeks.
A brass thimble with a precisely calibrated hole in the center — later simplified to a flat washer — fitted inline in the fuel line just before the carburetor. It restricted maximum fuel flow to just enough to prevent flooding without cutting off power. The key breakthrough: it could be fitted without taking the aircraft out of service. No downtime. No factory return.
The old guard at the RAE looked at it and called it a plumbing fix. They called her a plumber. The first batch of 5,000 units was made by a Birmingham firm that normally manufactured plumbing fixtures, which they found embarrassing.
The RAF pilots who flew Spitfires with Messerschmitts on their tails called it something else.
They called it Miss Shilling's Orifice. With deep affection.
By March 1941 she had organized a small team and was personally touring RAF fighter stations across England — traveling between bases on her old racing motorcycle — fitting the device to every Merlin engine they could reach. Squadron leaders all over the country were demanding installations. The word spread faster than the official channels could keep up with.
The Germans noticed. They couldn't explain why British fighter pilots had suddenly started following them into dives. They were baffled by the new aggression. They didn't know about the washer.
The restrictor remained in use until 1943, when the full pressure carburetor finally arrived. It had kept British pilots alive for two years in the middle of the war they couldn't afford to lose.
After the war she worked on the Blue Streak missile. She studied what wet runways do to braking distances. She helped design a bobsled for the RAF Olympic team. In 1967 she solved overheating problems on an Eagle Mk1 Formula 1 car.
She never received a top promotion at the RAE. Such positions, she was told, were for men.
She received an OBE in 1949. The citation said "services to aviation." It did not mention the washer.
She retired from the RAE in 1969. She kept racing motorcycles and sports cars. She modified and tuned both in her home workshop until she couldn't anymore.
She died on November 18, 1990. She was 81.
The Battle of Britain is one of the most documented events in British military history. Hundreds of books. Dozens of films. Memoirs by the pilots who flew in it. Almost none of them mention the carburetor problem. Almost none of them mention her.
The pilots who benefited most never knew her name. They just knew that when they pushed the nose down, the engine kept running.
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
I'm back at Southwark Crown Court for Tommy Robinson's @TRobinsonNewEra verdict. I've heard rumours that we'll hear before 2.00 pm.
I'm sure you're all hoping he's not guilty.
Hair by Fairy Liquid, I've run out of shampoo.
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
🇺🇦🇷🇺 RUSSIAN SOURCES SAY AN ENTIRE ASSAULT COMPANY HAS BEEN WIPED OUT NEAR KHARKIV
Russian sources are reporting the complete destruction of the 4th Motorized Rifle Company of Russia’s 127th Motorized Rifle Regiment during recent fighting along the Belgorod-Kharkiv axis.
The company belonged to the regiment’s 2nd Battalion, which has been involved in operations around Vovchansk and neighboring sectors of northern Kharkiv Oblast.
If confirmed, the loss would represent a serious blow to the unit. The exact number of soldiers killed, wounded, captured or missing has not been established, and the claim of the company’s complete destruction remains unverified.
What makes the reports particularly striking is that they are emerging from Russian sources themselves.
Russian military channels have repeatedly circulated appeals from relatives searching for soldiers who disappeared after being sent into combat. Some families have been left without clear information about whether their loved ones are alive, wounded, captured or dead.
These accounts contrast with Moscow’s official emphasis on territorial advances and successful offensive operations.
The northern Kharkiv front has become a costly battlefield, with Russian forces continuing to commit personnel to attacks around Vovchansk despite persistent Ukrainian resistance.
Losing an entire company is not simply a matter of replacing names on a personnel roster. Combat experience, coordination between soldiers, familiarity with the terrain and effective small-unit leadership take time to develop. Replacements cannot immediately restore those capabilities.
For Russian commanders, continuing assaults with depleted formations can create additional problems, particularly when surviving personnel are exhausted and newly assigned troops have limited experience operating together.
The reported destruction of the 4th Company does not establish the wider condition of the 127th Regiment or prove that Russian operations in the sector have collapsed.
But if the Russian accounts are accurate, they provide another indication of the human cost Moscow’s forces are absorbing in their attempts to advance through northern Kharkiv Oblast.
Behind the battlefield reports are Russian families still searching for answers about soldiers who never returned from their missions.
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
🇬🇧 Good luck to @TRobinsonNewEra in court today! 🤞
Hopefully, when he walks out of court, he’ll be doing the Irish jig! ☘️
Fingers crossed for a positive outcome today. 🙏🇬🇧
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
Elderly man asks invaders to stop setting fireworks outside his house in Antwerp.
The savages attack him!
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
🇺🇦🇷🇺 A RUSSIAN SOLDIER BEGGED A UKRAINIAN DRONE FOR MERCY. WHAT CAME NEXT WAS UNEXPECTED
A Russian soldier, apparently wounded and desperate, pleaded for his life as a Ukrainian drone hovered above him.
The operator had the ability to drop an explosive. Instead, he sent down a bottle of water and an injection intended to help stop the bleeding.
It is a remarkable reversal of what soldiers have come to expect from drones on the battlefield. These machines are usually associated with surveillance, explosives and the terrifying knowledge that someone kilometres away can decide whether you live or die.
In this encounter, the person behind the controls chose to help an enemy soldier.
The Russian had no way of knowing whether the approaching drone would bring another attack or something that might keep him alive. The Ukrainian operator, meanwhile, had to make a decision about a man fighting for the army invading his country.
Providing medical assistance does not erase the war or the suffering Russian forces have inflicted on Ukrainians. Nor does one act of compassion change the realities of the battlefield.
But there is something profoundly human about a Ukrainian soldier choosing to send water and medical aid to a vulnerable Russian instead of an explosive.
For a brief moment, a machine built into the machinery of war became a means of saving a life.
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇸🇷🇺
Putin sells Trump diesel he doesn’t have. Americans pay even more at the pump while US money flows to russia as it bombs Ukraine. Now Putin wants Trump to deliver Ukraine on a platter & carve up Europe. The diesel was just the appetizer 👇
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻-𝗽𝗮𝘆𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁.
Trump waived sanctions so Putin can sell diesel he does not have. The cash funds missiles on Ukrainian cities and the hybrid campaign already running across Europe. Americans still pay near-record prices. In Putin’s hometown the pumps are dry. The leaders get the photograph and the money. Everything else is already being built around that single, trivial transaction.
𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗹 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗥𝘂𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗹. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻'𝘁 𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸. 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘂𝗽 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱.
9 October: 300,000 tons “immediately,” then 500,000, then a million, plus three million more “depending on the refineries.” Waiver until April 2027. The market shrugged. U.S. diesel still sits at roughly $6.28–6.32 a gallon. The United States is a major exporter. The first 40,000-ton tanker left Primorsk for a mid-November arrival — after the midterms. Three ships, Novak says. Tiny barrels. Maximum optics. No relief for the trucker or the farmer.
𝗣𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗹 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘂𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗼𝗿.
Rosbalt reports diesel at just 62% of stations in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region. Dry pumps, rationing, queues whenever fuel arrives. Independent stations are suffering most. Ukrainian strikes have cut Russian diesel production by roughly 30%, yet Moscow keeps exporting it.
𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽'𝘀 𝗥𝘂𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗹 𝗵𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆𝗺𝗼𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝘆 𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.
On 26 October, senior Democrats and Republican Thom Tillis demanded that major U.S. banks and ports preserve all records of Russian diesel deals. Their warning: possible sanctions violations, criminal liability and money financing Putin's war.
An investigation is being prepared for after the midterms if control of the chamber flips. The first tanker hasn't even docked.
𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁.
Putin intends to use the Ukraine talks to force NATO back to its 1997 borders — withdrawal of troops and weapons from Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Estonia. That is why Ushakov insists Europe must sit at the table. Western diplomats see the demand clearly and reject it. Peskov stated yesterday that Russia will not stop military operations during the “peace” talks; the armed forces continue massive strikes. Local humanitarian pauses (Oleshky, Melania Trump’s initiative) are offered as theatre. Kaja Kallas, same day in Paris: little hope for imminent peace. Russia continues attacks on Kyiv and is sinking civilian ships in the Black Sea. The EU’s task, she said, is to help Ukraine withstand and raise the cost for Moscow. New sanctions this month; more coming. The diesel opening, the fertilizer talk, the Novatek channel in Alaska — all of it is designed to drag Moscow out of isolation while Europe absorbs the hybrid pressure and the political bill.
After nationalising over 800 European companies worth 7.6 trillion rubles, Putin now promises “favourable conditions” for those who stay. He even claims Europe has plenty of friends of Russia who were “forced to leave.”
𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗸𝗼𝗳𝗳 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗣𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝘁. 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿, 𝗯𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗵𝗶𝘁 𝗞𝘆𝗶𝘃.
“You are a humanist also, sir, and I salute that.” Putin then expressed regret about the losses. Hours later Russian forces launched a massive ballistic missile attack on Kyiv. Why stop killing when Washington applauds your humanity? A few words of sorrow cost nothing. The bombing continues.
𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗹. 𝗣𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻 𝘄𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗮 𝗺𝗮𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲.
The diesel is the appetizer. The real meal is a New Yalta in which three men decide Ukraine’s fate in a room where Ukraine is not invited, and NATO is invited only to be dismantled. Trump gets the photograph and the illusion of mastery. Putin gets cash, sanctions relief, time, and a chance to rewrite the European security order. Ukraine pays in blood. Europe is expected to pretend the price is acceptable.
𝗨𝗸𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼 𝗳𝗼𝗼𝗹. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆 — 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗞𝘆𝗶𝘃 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝘀𝗼.
Sources close to Zelensky dropped it today: the suspension of strikes on Russian refineries is only a pause. The United States and others asked for it. Kyiv is waiting for answers. It will not last.
While Moscow sells scraps of diesel it does not have, Ukrainian strikes continue on the real targets. In the last days: the Energiya plant in Yelets — Russia’s sole producer of power batteries for glide bombs, Iskander-M missiles and cruise missiles — was hit and burned. The main microchip workshop at Proton-Electrotex in Oryol, which feeds components for ballistic and cruise missiles, was destroyed. Radars, command posts and other air-defence nodes in Belgorod Oblast were struck. Russia is already dry on diesel. Its air defence, stretched thin and failing to intercept, is dropping its own munitions across Belgorod. The city is being hammered by both Ukrainian drones and the debris of Moscow’s own systems.
Putin keeps losing allies and still demands that Europe surrender Kyiv so he can roll NATO back to the 1997 borders. Peskov has already confirmed that the “peace” process will not pause the killing. Every serious assessment of the war, from historians to Western intelligence agencies, says the same thing: a settlement that leaves Russia intact is only a pause that lets it rebuild for the larger war it is already preparing in Europe. Trump is arranging the division of spheres of influence with Putin and Xi. The diesel is only the down-payment. The rest — the New Yalta, the pressure on NATO’s 1997 borders, the continued killing — is already under way.
Trump’s America has now crossed a line that earlier administrations, for all their other failures, treated as non-negotiable. Calling the organizer of the largest land war in Europe since 1945 a humanitarian is not a slip. It is a public announcement that the American side has decided the moral accounting no longer applies. The release of one elderly American teacher is treated as sufficient counterweight to the systematic targeting of Ukrainian civilians, the abduction of children, and the deliberate destruction of energy infrastructure ahead of winter. The comparison is not between two acts of mercy. It is between a hostage release and an ongoing campaign of extermination. Treating them as equivalent is the definition of the stain.
For Putin the genocide of Ukraine stopped being a policy years ago. It became the fixed idea that holds the entire construction together.
Half Trump’s term was spent exposing him. The rest may be spent trying to stop him. Washington will debate the depth of his stupidity while Putin continues slaughtering Ukrainians.
Mark Pensarn🇬🇧🇺🇦🏴🐶🐱🌻🐬🦏 retweeted
A wholesome pub conversation in the old #fen accent.
The Fen accent is a distinct regional variety of East Anglian English spoken in the marshlands and flatlands of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire. It developed from a mix of Northern and Southern English dialects, old Norse, and Dutch influences, shaped heavily by the historic isolation of the Fenland communities.
They don't make them like they used to.. 🍻