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In Destination Moon (p.5-6), The Calculus Affair (p.29-34) and in Tintin and the Picaros (p.35-36), three different models of helicopters can be spotted.

In which other album is such a vehicle mentioned but not drawn?
Please quote album and page.

In Prisoners of the Sun, page 29, bottom right-hand corner frame, Snowy says, "Golly, a helicopter!" as he and Tintin descend from the rockface with Tintin clinging onto the condor's legs.

Well done Balthazar! In Flight 714 (p.59-A2) too, a helicopter is mentioned by Mik Kanrokitoff, in order not to reveal the presence of the flying saucer in which the baddies are busy climbing.

Your turn to set the next question!

Thanks, yamilah.

I did vaguely recall something about the flying saucer in Flight 714 being mistaken somehow for a helicopter, but I checked in the wrong place - the scene where it arrives in the volcano crater intead of the scene where the baddies are taken aboard - so thought I must have imagined it in that book. Glad to discover my memory was only half-failing me on that one!

Does the helicopter-mention which I did find feature in Hergé's original French-language Tintin Magazine and book versions of Prisoners of the Sun, do you know? Obviously, it doesn't matter for the purposes of this quiz, but Snowy would be very up-to-date talking about helicopters in the mid 1940s, so it'd be interesting to know. There were certainly helicopters around at the time Prisoners of the Sun was being written (the first really practical one had been built and flown by Igor Sikorsky in 1939), but they were only just beginning to be widely used. Still, Hergé was a great one for keeping his work modern and contemporary.

Thanks for your constructing comments.
See frames on page 8 and 9 showing Milou and the condor, in the Belgian Tintin magazine: it seems the dog is rather silent, in the original version, but I'll still check in the book.

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[Edited by Mod: removed links to unauthorised reproductions of Tintin albums.]

Thanks; that's interesting.

My guess would be that Snowy at least says something in the French-language book version. (Not sure exactly when the magazine version was recast into book form, but I know quite a few changes and cuts were made by Hergé at this point.) I doubt that the English translators would have given Snowy a brand new speech balloon if he had none at all in the Casterman book. But they may have changed what he says.