Firetop

Popped up to Duxford’s Imperial War Museum (Cambridgeshire) on Saturday for the ‘Flying Legends’ air display. Admission prices have skyrocketed since I was a lad - it cost £150 for my carload of people to get in. The last time I went (in the mid 1990s) it was about £30 per car to drive in and watch the air display… a decade later it’s £30 PER PERSON with additional costs for ‘walking past the planes on the air strip’ or getting on board for a ‘look around’. Now call me Victor Meldrew but with people collecting to ‘get Concorde flying again’, shouting “Got any spare change?” I thought they’d have to be pretty lucky to find anybody at the show with that luxury.

Despite the high entry fee the new aircraft hangar at Duxford is VERY impressive, it’s a little like a scaled up boy’s bedroom ceiling with full size aircraft from a bygone era hanging on metal cables from the roof. I don’t ever remember seeing the SR 71 Blackbird before so that was a nice surprise find in the main hangar, such a huge and unusual plane, hard to believe it flew on the edge of space at 85,000 feet. It really does look like something made with extra-terrestrial intelligence (or Nazi Germany’s designers who emigrated to the USA’s air research division in area 51 after WWII… if the TV documentaries are to be believed).

When the air display commenced at 2pm it was great, call me a geek but the sight of ten Spitfires taking off together and passing overhead did give me goose bumps. I couldn’t help but think that here was a sight seen so often during the air defence of Britain and it felt quite eerie with the noise of the Merlin and Griffon engines roaring overhead. Only the flypast at the end of the show featuring more than thirty different WWII era aircraft all together managed to come close.

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