#tiltwing

US Army tilt wing helicopter NHHS Photo by SDASM Archives

The Pilot’s Love Song (lit. Love Song for a Certain Pilot) is a series of light novels written by Koroku Inumura.  The TV anime adaptation was directed by Toshimasa Suzuki, written by Shinichi Inotsume, and animated by TMS for the winter 2014 season.

The series follows Kal-el Albus, his class mates, and the rest of a city as they ride a flying rock in soft exile to try to find the legendary End of the Sky.

Allow me to start out this review by saying that this was, when it was first coming out, the first anime that I ever saw based so heavily around airplanes.  As such, it has a special place in my heart.  So while the plot may be a bit iffy and some of the themes are questionable, that’s not what we’re here for anyway.  This is an airplane anime through and through.  I was hooked with the opening scene, and every episode had some good flying in it, even the class-ramen-shop-for-a-festival episode.  If you are feeling down because of anime that don’t have planes, this is a good one to pick up.

Love Song takes place in the same universe as The Princess and the Pilot, and, while the events take place after the plot of the movie, it is not necessary to view Princess first (though there is a good Easter egg that I missed the first time I watched the show because I had not yet seen the movie). It does, however, mean that the world is the same: magic, kingdoms, and high-tech World War II style aesthetics to the airplanes (Seiichi Nakatani being the mechanical designer for the series).

The main aircraft used in Love Song is the El Halcon, a two-seater tiltwing (erroneously called tilt-rotor) training aircraft.  It features an open cockpit where the pilot sits, and farther aft a station for a navigator/observer.  Being a training craft the El Halcon has no in-built armaments, and though there appears to be a railing to mount a heavy machine gun around the aft seat for the most part the cadets are shown using a rifle as their only means of defense.

The Laguardia comprises the main aerial force of Balsteros Republic, and the plane that the cadets are training to fly.  Essentially it is a more powerful version of the El Halcon, with an enclosed cockpit and stronger engines, though the only armament appears to be a machine gun mounted at the open aft seat.  There are a few other minor changes to the body to differentiate them, such as the El Halcon’s V-tail being inverted on the Laguardia, or the Laguardia having vertical stabilizers behind either engine.  Both are amphibious, recharging their hydrogen fuel cells in the oceans, a plus considering that Love Song shows the planet to be even more of a water world than was suggested by Princess.

While I do not like the tiltwing design of the El Halcon as much as I do the traditional, fixed-wing design of many of the other airplanes in the series, beggars can’t be choosers, and it does let them do some interesting things with character interaction and grand battle tactics.  Unfortunately aerial combat in this anime often goes a few steps beyond “highly suspect;” simply put there is no way you can convince me that a group of kids armed with rifles can take out a squadron of supposedly boom and zoom fighters, especially when the cadets are taught to bunch up.  It should make for a scene reminiscent of a western’s wagon fort, with the tension that that imparts, but in this context it just ends up making the enemy look laughably incompetent and the cadets that survive armored with plot rather than wits or skill.

The Pilot’s Love Song takes home 4.5 out of 5 Airplanes for some darned good flight sequences, even if it tends to eschew the reality of aerial combat a bit too much for my taste.

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