Some aircraft just hit my buttons. Spitfires, obviously for my generation. The Lightning. The Harrier. The Vulcan! And this one, the Bell 47, beloved of Skippy and Flying Doctors (I think…less sure about that one). Let’s not forget the UH-1H Huey on M.A.S.H. Love them all. I live near Duxford and my sister in law is something really interesting at RAF Hendon which must be one of the best jobs. A trip to see a real Flying Fortress in the museum is astonishing…I mean, how did this enormous thing get off the ground?
Your faves? Any Sopwith Camel fans out there?
Ekranoplan!
Not only an excellent potential name for a icy, moody synth duo – but a ground effect aeroplane/hovercraft thing that the Soviets saw as the future. It’s big AND clever. In the last minute of the video you can see one in action.
I used to love watching “Whirybirds” as a small boy which featured the Bell helicopter.
Can anybody remember the names of the two pilots ( I do know the answer to this) ?
Can’t recall their names (probably “Buck” and “Chip” or something) but one episode particularly sticks in my mind. The plucky chaps had to fly a crate of nitroglycerine (which looked just like a crate of Corona Ice Cream Soda to my 5 year old eyes) up to a log-jam in the high reaches of a remote river. Cue much sweating, upper lip chewing and intense close ups of chinking bottles of the evil stuff. I was balanced on the edge of my seat for the whole episode, and my feet didn’t even reach the floor at the time.
Close call Vulpes. The pilots names were Chuck and PT.
Rather like the old film from 1953 “The wages of fear” (remade as “The Sorcerer” with a Tangerine Dream soundtrack in 1977) about a truck load of nitro glycerine being transported through South America. A film that literally had me on the edge of my seat when I saw it on TV many years ago.
Remade on the Goon Show as “The Fear of Wages”.
William Mate Cobblers turns up at the Labour Exchange: “Any fear of work today?”
My friends and I loved Whirlybirds too.
There was also Seahunt featuring Lloyd Bridges (father of Jeff and Beau) as Mike Nelson. It often featured a Bell helicopter with floats so that Mike Nelson and any co-divers could be dropped into and picked up from the sea.
Yes me too. Maybe that’s where my affection for the Bell comes from.
Plane porn? You want this fella.
He used to be my next door neighbour, and has also a fine ear for americana, introducing me to any number of artists, from Nanci Griffith, through Steve Earle into Pure Prairie League and Steve Bruton.
https://www.cordwell.aero
GeeBee
Lockheed Starfighter
Concorde
SR-71
Thunderbird 2
Angel Interceptor
Just about any WW2 plane, really (Could watch Battle Of Britain, Tora! Tora! Tora! or Catch-22 anytime, just for the aviation footage)
I watched from the apron as a pair of Starfighters took off from the main runway at R.A.F. Wildenrath in about 1972; it seemed they would never rotate, using all of the runway’s length, but when they finally left the ground the sight and sound as they climbed away was nothing short of splendid. It was the only time I ever saw that model in action, but made a lasting impression.
I started reading your post and expected it to conclude “….time to die”
A friend of ours had a house in Oxfordshire that was at the end of the runway. Based there in the late 80s were American F-111’s. They would take off and pull a hard right straight away. The noise was incredible. And deeply comforting to feel that nuclear-equipped planes were flying at 200 ft over your house.
We used to watch the F111s coming in to Filton from the back of the Systems & Computing offices, from where we could see the majority of the runway, including the apex – the runway had a pronounced hump in the middle. Though it was a very long runway, a pilot putting down close to one end wouldn’t be able to see the far end once their wheels were on the deck, which meant that a degree of faith was required on their part in order for them to be sure the concrete didn’t end ten yards further than they could actually see. For that reason, USAF pilots making their first ferry run into Filton would often bottle out on the first approach, resulting in a full re-heat hurried departure back into the sky, and a feast of ear-splitting power for us to enjoy. On one memorable occasion, the pilot was so convinced that he was going to end up face first in the housing past the runway, causing a massive conflagration if his tanks were still full, that he circled the place dumping fuel (see the picture above) in a spectacular fashion until convinced he was on vapour only before sticking it back in for a final landing.
We lived close to Upper Heyford, and the F-111s were a constant sight and sound over the town, as were the various aircraft of Central Flying School at Little Rissington.
The F-111s replaced the F-101 Voodoos at Heyford. They made a haunting moaning noise at certain throttle settings. It was only years later that I read that the F-101s only mission was to drop a nuclear weapon on a ‘tactical’ target deep in Europe. A one-way mission. No fuel to return, no guarantee of in-flight refuelling. RAF nuclear bombers appear to have had similar ‘mission profiles’ for some of their targets.
@vulpes-vulpes
Grew up on the Dutch/German border. Remember the Wildenrath air shows with the Harriers (on loan from Bruggen? Gutersloh?) and then spent the late 80’s there with Phantoms. Great times.
@freddy-steady
I can imagine an air show at Wildenrath would be rather splendid!
I never got to see one, as I was only there for two weeks as an air cadet in the CCF at school. We got billeted on the base and flown around all over West Germany in a Pembroke belonging to 60 Squadron when it wasn’t taking sneaky pictures of dastardly Soviet too-ings and fro-ings over the border.
The base also homed several fighter Squadrons, who had just taken delivery of Harriers when we stayed there – we were forbidden to take photographs of the aircraft from anything closer than 100 feet!
The Phantoms came to Wildenrath a couple of years after my visit I think. While I was there we saw visitors from Sweden (Drakkens and Viggens) as well as the F-104s.
I had a great time – 16 years old and swaggering about Germany in an RAF uniform! Most of us had pockets full of change from the journey over, and were delighted to discover than a 5p piece was exactly the same size and weight as a DM, and would allow us to buy fags and chocolate from machines in the NAAFI at an outrageously advantageous exchange rate….
Speaking of the Dutch border, we spent one fab day at the Philips exhibition called “Evoluon” if I rember correctly – a flying saucer shaped building full of brilliant interactive science exhibits. We also got to spend a day strolling around Eindhoven – what a lovely town – and I also recall that we stumbled across a couple of wrecks of Sherman tanks, still where they had brewed up during the Second World War, left in place as memorials. Quite an eye-opener for a lad from the provinces.
60 Squadron were still there when I was there. All seemed a bit quaint and old fashioned even compared to the Phantoms which themselves were pretty ancient by then. Wildenrath was a great posting and I did a lot of hopping over into Holland and did do Evuolon too. Think I’ve got a postcard of it somewhere. Imagine it’s all a bit of its time now.
Sadly, I think it’s now a conference centre! I’ve definitley got some postcards from there – if I remember, I’ll scan and post them on the blog the next time that particular box of stuff gets unearthed.
A Conference Centre…oh dear!
Aha. The Lockheed Starfighter, known as The Flying Coffin, The Widow Maker and The Jinx Jet because of the high rate of crashes.
It was fairly quickly rejected by the US airforce as unstable but got fobbed off on the German defence ministry, where it’s designed role as a light fair-weather fighter was changed, after untested modifications which rendered it even more unstable, to use as a heavy-duty bomber. A total of 916 were ordered.
30% of those used by the Luftwaffe and the German Federal Navy eventually crashed and 116 German pilots were killed. Canada lost 46% of the 235 they bought. In USAF service it had the unenviable record of 30.63 accidents per 100.000 flight hours up to the end of 2007, the highest of any of the USAF Century Series aircraft and around double that of it’s rivals the F-100 Super Sabre and F-102 Delta Dagger.
Hawkwind’s Robert Calvert was inspired to create this oddity of an album in 1974.
The 1978 RAF Mildenhall Airshow, my first big airshow. After spending ages
(well, ages for an 11 year old) waiting for some parachute display team to
do their thing the announcer comes over the tannoy..
“Ladies and Gentlemen.. the Royal Canadian Airforce..”
From behind us come 2 or 3 Starfighters blasting in fast and low.
Still never seen so many people jump at once.
@mike-h
I bought that album! “Catch a falling star fighter…” Still, it was better than Lucky Lief and the Longships;
“Captain Lockheed..” is a rather mixed bag album. Sublime to ridiculous, except that the best bits fall a little short of sublime.
Love that cover with the plaster Starfighters in formation above the fireplace.
One of my earliest memories is seeing Concorde flying over Knutsford airshow in 1969ish, would have been about four. One of the last aircraft made where aesthetics were clearly a big part of the design.
And of course, the F-14 Tomcat. Weston-Super-Mare arcade in the late 70s had a Tomcat inspired game (pre-Space Invaders) where you sat in a pilot chair with a joystick as flickering projections of planes played on a screen in front of you.
how come we have never done Plane Porn before?
An aside – I’ve always thought it odd that we talk about ‘Concorde’ as if it was one plane. We never say ‘I saw a Concorde’.
When working at Heathrow, which I occasionally did in the ’90s, you could set your watch by the 11o’clock Concorde to New York.
Completely unmissable as it was the loudest aircraft you were likely to hear there. At 11am precisely, it taxied from it’s own private terminal, past all the other lesser aircraft waiting for takeoff slots and thundered down the runway and away.
I worked for a couple of months on some offices just outside the airport perimeter in ’92 and for every 11am takeoff you could guarantee a couple of car alarms would be triggered by the vibration.
I went to Reading university, and Concorde would put the afterburners on soon after passing over Her Maj’s gaff in nearby Windsor. You could indeed set your watch by the 11:02 roar.
Only yanks say Afterburners…
The correct term is of course Reheat.
Back in the day, one of my aunties lived in Millbrook, Cornwall, out on the Rame peninsula about 5 miles south west of Plymouth. They had a nice retirement bungalow, with a massive picture window with a great view – it was one plate of glass about twelve feet by five, covering an entire wall of the living room.
At the time, Concorde was under instructions not to go supersonic until out over the Western Approaches, some way south of the UK land mass. When the pilots push the throttle and go supersonic, the shockwave and boom spreads out across a remarkably flat front, almost perpendicular to the direction of travel.
Every afternoon, at a certain time, if one sat in the armchair by their picture window, one could tell when the shock wave passed across south-eastern Cornwall by the massive wobble that would suddenly undulate acorss the entire pane of glass. With the visual clue to alert the ear, the infrasound could clearly be experienced in your chest.
Given that Concorde was around 30 miles away the time and climbing through 45,000 feet, it was easy to appreciate the huge power at play with its two Olympus 593 engines spooled up on full chat.
That’s two pairs of Olympus 593s.
I remember how we were told that Concorde was no louder than any other airliner. We were lied to.
Greenhouses used to get smashed in Cornwall quite regularly.
Yes, me too. I used to work in Reading and would hear ‘a’ Concorde biffing off to NYC at 11am every week day.
‘That’ll be me one day’ I thought. And lo! It wasn’t.
The Fairey Swordfish. I saw Sink The Bismark at the cinema when it came out and the scenes when they are attacking the most powerful battleship in the world, flying through curtains of flak in those biplanes to drop their one torpedo are incredible.
I have a whole bookshelf full of aviation porn, and my log book remains tucked into the same shelf, a few hours short of a PPL (I ran out of cash).
As a small boy, when not glued to Whirlybirds or The Flying Doctor on the BBC, I dreamed of owning and flying a Catalina around the impossibly romantic and exotic islands of the South China Sea, Indiana Jones style, long before he had been invented.
I was inspired by the yarn of Biggles and the Cruise of the Condor; having trounced the Hun over the Western Front, biggles and pals took to the skies over South America in a biplane amphibian, which, while a splendid aircraft, had none of the glamour of the Catalina.
The picture book version I have in a loft somewhere had the bad guys in a Focke Wolfe FW200 ‘Condor’. The Condor is a splendid machine itself, but it’s a WW2 era behemoth that didn’t make its first flight until several years after the good Captain first published The Cruise Of The Condor, so its a device appropriated by the producers of the picture book version rather than an aircraft from the original story.
North American P-51 Mustang
Hawker Hurricane.
Always my Airfix (and air fix) of choice
Horsepower! Cadillac of the skies!
That was some machine right there.
Call me a grumpy skeptic, but I still can’t see how a young English boy, held for years in a Japanese POW camp in mainland China, would know what either a P-51 or Cadillac was.
It’s Hollywood. Any resemblances to actual facts, persons or events are purely coincidental.
There’s a good display on the P51 Mustang at Duxford. It was a bit of a loser of a plane until in desperation they put a Merlin engine it and it suddenly became a monster because of its incredible range and could accompany bombers all the way to Germany and back.
A few years back I had the immense pleasure of arriving in a Piper Cherokee at Duxford with a mate for the big WW2 air display day. We walked out onto the concourse through the Pilots entrance, something that induced maximum chuffedness in yours truly.
That sounds a blast. Lucky bugger. Might head up to Duxford this hols with the boy. They also have a lunch called the Lancaster Banger – Cumberland sausage, mash and onion gravy. Yum!
More than a few years back, during a brief period when I had flying lessons, I flew to Duxford with my mate/instructor for a flying display (not including me, I hasten to add – Cessna 172s didn’t quite cut it).
On the way back after the show we were cruising along over Hertfordshire when I detected a strange vibration in the air. Uh-oh said my mate, and took back control, whereupon we were overtaken with a tremendous Merlin roar by a Spitfire, right alongside us. We bounced all over the place – I’ve no idea how many rules the pilot broke, but we didn’t care. In fact we were so stoked I was allowed to buzz the runway at Hatfield at 100 ft.
That was my best flying day – made a change from O-B-U-M-M-M-P-F-F-I-T-C-H-H and bloody slide rules.
Ugly as sin but The Lancaster is the daddy of all WW2 bombers. As often in the page of Commando, WW2 Picture Library, Wizard and other comics. And of course that film.
And a proper birthday size Airfix kit build – in super black plastic rather than the usual grey.
I had that kit! Made a hamfisted 11 year old job of it – glue finger prints on the perspex, wheels that wouldn’t spin, props that wouldn’t turn.
You might be interested to know that there are two 1:32 scale kits of the Lancaster. Rather larger than an Airfix Lanc – around a metre wingspan.
One is available now (from HK Models) and is a really nice kit.
I’m saving my money for the ‘Wingnut Wings’ kit which will be out later this year. Wingnut is Sir Peter Jackson’s company, and they make the most wonderful kits of World War I aircraft.
@moseleymoles
Ugly as sin? I beg to differ!
If you have a spare £2.5m then you can buy your own Spitfire…..
https://www.platinumfighters.com/spitfirepl344
Aircraft were my interest as a kid, up and until about the age of 13 when they were usurped by Fender Telecasters and the sounds they made.
I was fascinated by the engineering miracle. Tons of metal suspended in thin air by forward motion and lift. I’m still not quite over it. I recall standing on the platform at Twickenham station one blue cloudless morning just recently to see 8 or 10 747’s and Airbuses stacked above in the endless sky on top of each other drifting into the Heathrow approach. I was struck by the apparent impossibility of it. Gargantuan machines floating down through nothingness as a normality. All in a couple of human lifetimes.
I’m lucky to live near both Smithsonian Air and Space museums, and am a frequent visitor. I also did the whole rounds of Duxford et al as a kid.
Spitfire is the most beautiful piece of machinery I’ve seen, either on film or in real life.
Followed closely by the P51.
As posted above, the Lancaster is that jolie laide kind of plane; really rather ugly but in its own way kind of attractive.
Are we allowed to include space craft?
I did some work at the Science Museum – dull IT stuff, but if I needed to go to my boss’s office the quickest way was to cut through the museum and the aircraft display. I contend it is impossible to walk past a Spitfire without standing gazing at it with your mouth hanging open for 5 minutes.
Something that a co-worker and I speculated about one day, while working at Heathrow.
At mid-morning peak times on a clear day, you can see up to six aircraft in a line, on approach or actually touching down on the runway, the furthest as a just-discernable minute dot in the sky. Coming in and landing just a couple of minutes apart.
We wondered how far away the furthest-visible aircraft was. Never did come to a conclusion.
You could probably work it out these days with the Flightradar24 app.
Another classic, the mighty Mosquito. Buy near me in St. Albans. Also the best theme music evah!
Buy near? BUILT near! There’s a little museum on the road to Potters Bar.
Absolutely gagging for a modern remake with a massive CGI budget – I was always disappointed by the crap Airfix-model “special effects” in the fillum. I’ve staged better crashes in the back yard at home with an old placcy kit and some lighter fuel!
Obvs, would only contemplate forking out to see a remake if they stuck to the original theme music – what a gloriously stirring chooooon that is!
Not seen it for ages – must rewatch. I’m sure you’re right.
One of the crappy effects is – I believe – real.
Its the one where a Mosquito appears to ‘trip-up’, as its undercarriage collapses. They wrote-off the most knackered Mosquito they were using in the filming.
Most of the Mosquitos used in the film had been built as B.35s, with the bulged bomb bay to accommodate the 4000lb ‘cookie’ bomb and the two-stage Merlins, which gave the previously slim engine nacelles a bulkier appearance. Many B.35s were converted to target-tugs as TT.35s, with an air-driven winch under the former bomb bay, which was used to stream drogue targets for gunnery targets. The mainly civilian anti-aircraft cooperation units had had their Mosquitos replaced by Meteor TT.20s, leaving the Mossies with some hours on their airframe life.
Grey is, as you can guess, a colossal plane bore. . .
I’m prepared to believe that one shot may have been staged with a real aircraft, but the multiple ones where Stig the stagehand stands just off camera and throws an Airfix model full of Standard’s best bangers at a papier-mâché mountain painted battleship grey simply do not cut any mustard at all!
And about time too!
I made an Airfix Tiger Moth as a child. I bloody loved that plane. Shot it to pieces with my brothers air rifle as a teenager. Different times. ….
Edit: the things you find on YouTube
Forget all the noisy bastards (although the lightning and the Vulcan are pretty bloody awesome) and immerse yourself in the attractiveness of the little guys. I was a plane spotter for about 4 years from 12 to 16 and they were crazy years I tell you. Breaking into hangars to get the registrations of planes not visible to the less intrepid spotters.
Climbing into the grounded Constellation at Baggington airport in Coventry or aerodrome as it was then before it handled holiday jets before eventually being turned into industrial units.
My favourite resident at Birmingham airport was a Tipsy Nipper registered in Belgium with the registration number OO-LEO. I also loved my visit to the Britten Norman Islander factory in Bembridge, IOW and sitting in a brand new aircraft that was about to roll off the production line bound for Botswana. However the aircraft that has intrigued me most is the Lysander that transported paratroopers at night behind enemy lines in France apparently without detection. Now there was flying by the seat of your pants.
there is a Avro Vulcan museum on the old site near Stockport (you can probably fit in Jodrell Bank too). http://avroheritagemuseum.co.uk/
We took it in along with a visit to Manchester airport to see an Airbus 380 land and take off. I’ve flown in them which is fine, but everytime I see one take off I amazed that it does. Its the size of a block of flats. Manchester has a Concorde too. There is another at the Museum of flight in East Lothian, which also has the Blue Streak rocket. and a Vulcan.
Childhood crush on the Mustang of course.
I suddenly realise i sound like a plane spotter. I’m not, honest.
Is it a Vulcan that was (is?) on the ground near Gordon Boys’ School in West End, Surrey?
One of the great aviation experiences only lasts for 10 minutes – no, Moose, not that – and takes place in an Islander. Fly from the Aer Arann Connemara Airport just outside Spidall on the coast in Galway, headed for the island of Inis Mór. The single runway slopes down towards the cliffs, meaning there’s no room for overshoot, just a vertical drop onto the Atlantic at the far end. The runway on Inis Mór for the landing (and the return take-off) is just short of 500 yards long. The Islander is aptly named, and the pilot, who does this run several times a day during the summer months, will bang the machine down with purpose and assertion, whatever the wind wants to do to the aircraft on approach. It’s a ride and a half on a wild day. Watching the aircraft arrive to pick you up, as you loiter at the side of the runway, is guaranteed to cause some consternation on a blustery day as you contemplate being on board yourself in just a few minutes’ time. We’ve done the return trip a few times when in Connemara, and it’s always a highlight of the holiday for me. Thirty Euros or thereabouts for a return trip, if I recall, and money well spent.
Maho Beach ought to be on any planespotter’s list of places to visit
Landing at Gibraltar is a bit hair raising. The airstrip sticks out into the sea…and looks a bit small! Landing west to east you feel like you are touching down in the sea….as soon as you are down they throw the anchors out and you stop just short of the sea on the other end – the plane turns and you stare down into the briney. In the old days when we were in dispute with the Spaniards the border was closed and airspace was also denied, so the poor pilot had to approach from the south and then bank hard right before the above described landing. What fun!
Hong Kong is pretty lairey too. The plane does a hard bank before landing where you think you’re falling into the sea. Fun for days.
I served 25 years in the Royal Navy & my last 2 ships were the aircraft carriers Illustrious (87-90) & Invincible (90-93).
During this time I often saw Harriers take off & land & always found it an awesome sight & a fabulous aircraft.
Happy days.
There’s a great documentary on the iPlayer occasionally with the inventor of the Harrier -proper mad old English inventor.
I grew up about 20 miles from Heathrow and in the summer with classroom windows open, we’d often have to pause while a plane flew past due to the noise.
Concorde was quite a thing to see on a clear, cloudless day. Always loved watching it – even when it had been going for years.
Reminds me of this:
See any of these take off…?
This is fab and well worth a watch.
Love the inventor at 10′ 20 “What we need is a a small local war, not too many people killed”
Vulcan, Lightning, Lanc, Spit and Concorde. All beauties to me.
First time I went to Aus (1998) we were the plane behind Concorde at the end of the runway at LHR. Our 747 literally shook as it took off…
But, and I can’t believe no-one’s mentioned it yet, surely the most incredible beautiful/ugly plane ever has to be the A-10?
What a machine.
Sidebar is the best planes to fly in videogames:
A-10 for ground attack, can get that puppy to fly at about 10mph 10ft off the ground
Mosquito for the night infiltration missions
Typhoon for the air-to-air combat
Other sidebar: best fictional aircraft. Not Airwolf, this:
Functional. Airwolf had elegance. Also Jan Michael Vincent.
My favourite has to be the Hawker Sea Fury.
Many years ago myself and a couple of plane mad mates bunked into Tollerton Airport for the annual display.
We slept overnight in a disused pillbox under the flightline and in the morning were sunning ourselves on the warm concrete roof when the display began.
To this day I remember the navy’s historic flight Fury coming in.
All three of us watched him in the distance through binoculars and had the joyous fright of our lives as we dropped to the deck when he buzzed us.
I’d estimate about fifty feet altitude and in excess of 400 knots….
The sound was bloody fantastic.
You surely must have seen this astonishing footage:
Yeah, thanks.
Our beatup was slightly higher…sadly.
I don’t have a clue how to post but check out the almost deadly pass by a French Mirage F1 in (I guess) Iraq.
End of the runway at Fairford is the place to be, apparently…
My Aircraft of choice is a very personal one, it’s the Gloster Meteor. My late Father-in-Law flew them in the fifties when he was with RAAF 504 Squadron flying out of Wymeswold in Leicestershire.
It was the first British jet fighter and did see action in WW2, before my Father-in-Laws time.
He flew them until the Squadron disbanded in 1957 but carried on flying with the RAAF until 1969.
On New Years Day 1956 he was on a training flight flying Meteor WE873 when a reserve fuel tank detached went through the tail causing loss of control. He ejected (with a few nasty injuries) and the plane crashed in a field near Mildenhall. In 1994 wreckage was discovered and we went with him to see the site and get a few souvenirs.
https://youtu.be/pM2n49OY2XQ
Do you have any photos of the plane? I ask because I’m in the process of illustrating/writing a book on RAF aircraft of the 50s. The Meteor will be one of the types in it, along with the Hornet, Spitfire and Mosquito – a surprising number of the last two types served in RAF and RAuxAF squadrons past 1950.
I have some photos of 504 Squadron aircraft, not WE873. I believe its letter was ‘R’, which would have been on its fin and (probably) nose wheel door. It was an F.8 Meteor. The serial suggests it had the narrow air intakes, and it may also have had the earlier cockpit canopy with a larger metal area at its back.
I don’t think so, if there was it was handed over by my Mother in Law to the 504 Squadron association when he passed away in 2012. Which my wife wasn’t very happy about, but that’s another story.
If I find anything I’ll let you know.
Thanks. You can have a copy of the book as a swap for the info.
GCU, as a plane bore you probably know about this site, but in case you don’t and like to read accounts of aircraft in movies (well, one in particular)…
http://www.daveswarbirds.com/bob/frames.htm
The TSR-2 – the ill-fated British-built fighter bomber scrapped in the mid-sixties. My late father worked on it during his time at English Electric and later BAC at Warton – and I have a vague recollection of seeing it flying over Preston like some great white bird.
There’s one at Duxford and I occasionally go and give it a pat knowing that my dad designed a rivet or a panel somewhere.
It is a beautiful beast. All of the 50s UK jets have great aesthetics. There ‘s a nice 2-part BBC4 doc about the last era in which the UK air industry was a world beater.
The De Havilland Hornet. A single-seat, twin-engined long-range fighter/intruder. Described by the aviation writer Bill Gunston as ‘two Rolls-Royce Merlins, hotly pursued by an airframe’. 4000hp, fully aerobatic on two or one engine. A highly-skilled display pilot in the 40s did a routine first on two, then one, then no engines, restarting during a manoeuvre to land.
64 Squadron RAF, circa 1951.
(Photo widely available online and in print, probably from the Hawker Siddeley archive)
One of the Sea Hornet variants was really ugly – it had a second cockpit built behind the main one for a radar operator, topped with a small teardrop canopy, and an extended thimble shaped nose to hold the radar.
The Hawker Fury. The ultimate biplane interceptor-fighter to serve with the RAF. Powered by a 22-litre Rolls-Royce Kestrel V-12 engine. Fast, highly agile, and yet relatively easy to fly. Isn’t it, though?
At least one is flyable, as are – I believe – two Hawker Nimrods, the carrier-borne equivalent used by the Fleet Air Arm.
The Hawker Hurricane was effectively a monoplane development of this design, which is especially noticeable in photographs of the prototype Hurricane.
The construction is very similar, which has probably helped modern restorers – metalwork for one is similar to the other, but surprisingly complicated in shape. A mass of trusses and bracketry under the elegant skin.
Your last sentence is a real treat.
Trusses and Bracketry. A hinge & Bracket tribute act.
No more (please!) from them later.
Me Suspenders Is Killing Me.
‘Warren Girder’.
Warren Piece.
I am still fascinated by the Fouga Magister but this airplane is the one that makes me dream:
https://abpic.co.uk/pictures/view/1392579
The espadon looks like it went from space and crashed on earth.
Either that, or it’s a life-sized submarine out of the 60s Thunderbirds show
You’ll never get me up in one of those.
All of the above. Like everybody else I spent my childhood and youth gazing up at the skies and hanging around at airports. (My maths master said to me once, “It’s all right boy, it’s one of ours.”) My uncle (actually the husband of the daughter of my grandfather’s second wife, but uncle was easier) was a customs officer at Southend Airport, and he used to give me permission to roam all over it, including dashing across the runway, completely against the rules.
Aviation Traders, a local firm, had bought the RAF’s entire stock of Percival Prentices, 252 of them. Freddie Laker (for it was he) had grand plans to turn them into runabouts for the ex-RAF wallahs and new pilots he fondly imagined were going to beat his door down. In the event he sold 20. The rest mouldered quietly away on the far side of the airfield, and yours truly and his mates had a whale of a time clambering over them, looking for things to nick, and sitting in the cockpits going ratatat.
It was a pretty rubbish plane by all accounts, but I’m fond of it nevertheless.