>Lysander reminds me a lot of her distant German cousin, Fi-156.
>Another unarmed combatant, she's blonde, and vaguely female, but
>doesn't have the same panache as her more glamorous teammates. She
>came late into a growth spurt, and her sleeves and pants are *always*
>too short; the other girls have taken to calling her "Stork".

Despite her gawkiness (which is usually played for laughs, naturally), Fi's got a certain something goin' on, though. Partly I think it's because she's just fearless, like Lysa and that other great unarmed-but-up-for-it British Fly Girl, Tiger Moth, and completely unself-conscious about her unglamorous tendencies.

And interestingly, she's one of the few members of the Fly Girls cast who has an explicitly defined, unambiguous love life! In the manga, at least. She's got some kind of a thing going on with Professor Rommel, the Tank Club's faculty advisor. That's made extremely plain in the Afrika Korps story arc (Das Afrikalied, volumes 17 and 18). Oddly, no one within the story seems to think that's in any way inappropriate, though plenty of readers did.

(Exactly what the deal was with the ground forces seen throughout the series was always really heavily elided by the writers, both in the manga and on TV, for obviously logistical reasons. There's still an active subset of the fandom who are convinced that the armored vehicles work the same way, and that any moment now TV Tomodachi is going to announce Armor Girls, but on the other hand there are all those Russian tankers Ilyusha hangs around with in her off-hours, who are clearly neither girls nor metaphorical avatars of their tanks. And are they soldiers or students? Is what they're doing part of the tournament, or is there an actual war happening at the same time? It's all very much in the "don't look directly at this or you'll get a headache" mold.)

>Ah, but you get her in the air, now; short field take-offs and
>landings are never a problem, and, alone among the girls, give her a
>20-knot headwind and she can actually *hover*. She can go anywhere and
>see *anything* that needs to be seen, and no one will ever know she's
>been there.

I saw a replica Störch in action at a WWII-themed airshow once, many years ago. It was mighty impressive; there was enough of a wind that day that the pilot was able to demonstrate the almost-a-hover. Sadly, it's the kind of stunt you have to know a little about aeronautics to be impressed by, and most of the crowd that day evidently didn't.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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