Currently watching First Man and Ryan Gosling is so painfully unable to engage with his kids

No-one wants to tell their kids they might not be coming home, but you've still got to have that conversation.

My dad's dad was a pilot, died in an aeroplane crash when he was 2 or 3, my grandma remarried his uncle and we find it hard to talk about as a family.

So this hits quite hard.

I'm fairly sure my grandma had to move out of the RAF accommodation she was in soon after his death, with her 3 young children. I think there was a sense it was bad for morale to have a pilot's widow around.

Idk I just have a bit of a sense of how that kind of loss lingers and is hard to talk about. My grandad didn't die in WW2, he died afterwards in an accident. My grandma wasn't even sure who was flying the plane until a few years ago, when my dad wrote to someone in the RAF...

...who confirmed they didn't know who was flying the plane at the time.

(But then part of me wonders if that's a kind lie, because I think the crash was due to the pilot's misjudgement, but surely the truth would be kindest after all these years?)

Ok just talked to my dad and apparently they're fairly sure his dad was flying at the time

He was doing a tricky manoeuvre, flying low (which my dad says they didn't really need to train people to do, since planes didn't chase each other while flying low much any more), and he just pushed it too far and lost lift

This is the kind of plane he was flying, a Provost. I can't believe how tiny and old it looks nowadays.

(Not sure if this thread is interesting to anyone else, but it's helping me process, so hey.)