In the summer of 1955, a swept-wing fighter roared over central London at rooftop height and the city below briefly stopped breathing.
The pilot was not defecting, not lost, and not crazy in any ordinary sense.
He was flying one of the most elegant combat jets ever built, and within hours the British government would be forced to explain why a warplane had just buzzed the capital like it was auditioning for a movie.
The aircraft was the Hawker Hunter, and for a generation of aviation watchers it remains the most beautiful thing to ever leave a British runway.
Sleek, swept back, with an oval intake that looked almost organic, the Hunter was supposed to be Britain's answer to the Soviet MiG-15 and the American F-86 Sabre.
It entered service in 1954 and quickly became the backbone of Royal Air Force day-fighter squadrons across Europe and the Far East.
Then the strangest part of the story began.
Britain started giving the Hunter away, or selling it cheap, to allies all over the map.
India, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Chile, Kenya, Zimbabwe.
At one point the Hunter was flying in something like twenty air forces, which is a remarkable fate for a plane that never fired a shot in anger for the country that invented it.
Here is where conspiracy-minded observers start connecting dots.
During the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars, Hunter pilots flying for India racked up kills and took heavy losses, and the type became a legend in a conflict Britain had no official role in.
In 1967, Hunters flew for both sides of a Middle East war.
In Africa, Hunters showed up in Rhodesia and later in Zimbabwe's air force, aircraft that had passed through so many hands the paper trail goes cold.
Follow the money and the pattern looks less accidental.
The British aircraft industry in the 1950s and 60s was hemorrhaging, and the Hunter became a diplomatic currency.
Selling a proven jet to a nervous ally bought influence, basing rights, and goodwill at a moment when the empire was folding up and Washington was taking over the role of global arms dealer.
The Hunter was the consolation prize of a declining power.
The 1955 London flypast, by the way, was a publicity stunt gone sideways.
The pilot, a decorated RAF officer, was later court-martialed.
Some aviation historians say he was making a point about the Hunter's raw speed and agility.
Either way, the image of a Hunter skimming Big Ben is the kind of moment that gets scrubbed from official histories and lives forever in hangar folklore.
Today most Hunters are museum pieces or private warbirds, flown at airshows by men with deep pockets and deeper nostalgia.
The plane that once guarded West Germany's airspace now does lazy passes over English countryside, trailing smoke and applause.
My take: the Hunter is a perfect symbol of postwar Britain itself, brilliant, underfunded, handed off to whoever would take it, and remembered more fondly abroad than at home.
Final Thoughts
It is a ghost of an empire that could still build something the whole world wanted, even if it could no longer afford to keep it.