Where are all the Europeans?

[SteamyTea]

I see quite a few people trying to throw ashes off the cliffs.

They usually end up eating there dad.

[Ferdinand]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Harris said:

 

I've done this, scattered a friends ashes from the air.  It's far, far harder than it seems.

 

I made up a length of plastic soil pipe, with a lanyard to stop it falling out of the aeroplane, and poked this out through the partially opened door.  When you get the ashes from the crem they are usually inside a plastic bag that's inside the pot they give you.  Luckily I decided to do a practice run, using some ash from a bonfire, first.  I rigged up an elastic band tied to a bit of cord as a way of sealing the end of the plastic bag, and arranged it so the plastic bag of ashes was inside the bit of pipe, with the open end (sealed with the rubber band) facing downwards.  We flew over the practice area, I pulled the string, and the inside of the aircraft filled with ash...

 

When we landed we were both covered from head to foot in ash, and had to spend an hour cleaning the stuff out of the inside of the aeroplane.

 

We did two more practice runs, and found that we needed a really long bit of pipe to get the ash to fall away, and not get blown back.  The other problem was that the ash tended to come out as a massive "bomb" in one big lump, rather than as the gentle scatter we'd envisaged.  The final version of the ash dispenser used a smaller pipe (a bit of drain pipe) and had holes about 12mm in diameter drilled around the lower edge.  We also transferred the ashes into a narrower bag, and added a taped restriction just before the neck of the bag, to limit the flow rate.  This worked OK, although the reports we had from our friends gathered on the hill to see our friend scattered to the wind were that they didn't really see the ashes come out at all.

 

I should add that what we did was an offence - it's against the Air Navigation Order to drop stuff from a civilian aircraft.  We may also have been in breach of the 500ft rule, too, as we wanted to get as close as we could to the mourners.

 

So in short, Salisbury (or perhaps not Salisbury) Cathedral Spire and a blunderbuss might be easier. Or perhaps a helicopter, which would presumably blow it all away.

Edited December 2, 2019 by Ferdinand