First Airshow.

Hi
The first display I went to was a the old Speke (Liverpool) Airport in the 50s and the two things I will not forget was a B50 Tanking Two Voodo’s ?? and the Birdman getting Killed.

Not sure of the year, may have been 1965-66. Could have been RAF Gaydon. Saw the prototype Harrier (Kestrel?) perform. Was absolutely gobsmacked by the noise and blasted by debris when it hovered right in front of us. It seemed to be only few 10’s of metres away from the crowd line at the time. To me it felt that it was right over us.

Wardie

Hi all–

Seneca airfield, Haldimand County, Ontario, 1972 or so; two Bensen gyros and the Red Cap Pitts Special team, all parked on the grass in the pouring rain!

First one where I actually saw anything in the air? Hamilton, June 1975; the first of about two dozen Hamilton shows. Mustangs, Firefly, and Joe Hughes’ Stearman with wingwalker. (Soberingly, the wingwalker would have been Gordon McCollum, who was killed at Reno that fall. The Firefly would also be lost, along with CWH co-founder Alan Ness, at the 1977 CNE waterfront show at Toronto.)

S.

Mine was Farnborough 1958. We were coming back from holiday in Bournemouth and my Dad casually said ‘ I think the Farnborough Air Show is on today, let’s divert there and have a look’. “Black Arrows” looping 22 Hunters was serious stuff for this young lad in short trousers! Fairey Rotodyne, the ‘Westland circus’, waves of Hunters, Javelins, V-bombers, Canberras etc…..oh there was a serious interest here that couldn’t be ignored…. :rolleyes:

Southend, 1968 – recall a very noisy flypast & display by a Lightning, being allowed to look into the cockpit of a Spitfire, and seeing a Carvair under construction in one of the hangars.

I have the programmes for both this and the 1970 airshows – front covers reproduced below. Note the cost of flying your car to France from Southend in 1970 – from £9 each way!

Weston Park, approx 1978 and wondering who that bloke with the funny walk was…….Douglas Bader, but it meant nothing to me as a 10 year old. It does now as i can still remember his walk to his plane to take him away half way through the show.

woodford 99 or 2000, mig29, sheltering from the rain under the vulcan and a french display duo in mirages (i think) flying in incredably close formation, the connie was very impressive as well, bloody good show i thought!!

RAF St Mawgan – don’t remember a lot about it ( I think I was six – so that would make it 1964 ) but I do know my parents loved dragging out a picture of me stood under a wing of some beast with my tongue sticking out in disgust, because my ice lolly had just melted!!! 😮

My earliest recollections are of the Open Days at Wethersfield in 1963/64 which my Dad used to take me to. Some of you may recall the couple of pics of his that I’ve posted before.

After that, I remember going to (i.e. being taken to) North Weald in the mid 60s before I finally was old enough to take myself off to shows, and I became a regular at Greenham, Mildenhall, Lakenheath and others.

I vividly remember being at Biggin in about 1975. As I was crossing the field in line with the end of the runway (as you used to be able to do), the speck in the distance at the end of the runway was almost instantly over my head. Once I’d regained my equilibrium and dusted myself down, it transpires it was a Phantom getting airborne. Some time later, the ground stopped shaking!

CM

Good story Moggy, were you the boy in the cornfield.

No, would that I was as it appears he is now not only younger than I, but richer too.

As was the way with airshows in those days it was pretty uncoordinated, with long gaps between some of the acts, so by the time Valentin did his act my attention span had reached its limits and I was probably scuffing round in the dirt or pulling the wings off insects. Never saw it happen. In fact I think my parents were only aware of it from the Liverpool Echo that night, no announcement was made over the erratic PA

Moggy

Mine would be Dunstable Downs sometime in the late 60’s (or very early 70’s?) , all I really remember was the RAF museums replica gunbus flying, and some Sioux helicopters parked at the edge of the glider field.

Steve.

I was badly frightened by a Sea Fury when little more than a toddler. From what my dad told me later, I think it was the very last display at RAF Hooton, circa 1956.
I don’t think I was at the ‘bird man’ display at Liverpool the same year, although I do have memories of displays at Speke from the era. The clearest is of an air-to-air refuelling flypast involving, I’m pretty sure, a KB-50.
I was also, incidentally, at school with Clive Barker whose account of the ‘bird-man’ accident has been cited. Somewhere there’s a photograph of us together in the school play – I was the star and he was my sidekick. Now he’s a millionaire: where did I go wrong?
The serious showgoing started at Tern Hill for the BoB show in 1965. I’ve only missed four Farnboroughs since 1968 (which reminds me, I must sort myself out for this year…)

William

Not quite 😉

If anybody can be bothered to do the digging it was an airshow at Speke (Aka John Lennon Intergalactic Spaceport Above Us Only Smoke) in the 1950s memorable for a French ‘Birdman’ whose impersonation of a bird fell so far short of authenticity that he hit the ground with a resounding thump as his lifetime finale. 🙁

Novel act, but unrepeatable.

Moggy

Good story Moggy, were you the boy in the cornfield.

About 1990, my ex-wife, though not quite then, decided to butter up one her clients by treating him and his girlfriend to a typical advertising executives day out with a gold pass and enclosure at Biggin Hill airshow, which surprised me as by then she had got sick of me forcing her to go to airshows, fair enough.
To my surprise, myself and our then very young son were allowed to go too.
Great, no traffic jams, and a grandstand seat in front of the crowd line, we were even allowed to go inside Sally B which was parked next to us.
The show featured all the usual stuff of the period, the star being the Sandringham doing a few flybys.
One of the items was a mass parachute drop of about 100 people from a right assortment of a/c.
As they jumped, one of the parachutes didn’t open properly and the poor sod on the end quickly spiralled down.
Just like on your account, the action took place next to us, and amidst gasps and oohs, I covered my sons eyes.
Amazingly, the bloke appeared to land in a haystack and judging from the lack of sirens and racing ambulances, though vehicles did shoot off in that direction, he must have been ok.
Now I have never seen an account of this, nothing was mentioned after, either at the show or on the news, so I don’t know what exactly happened, unless it was a dummy to give us all a shock.
Anyone else there who can remember this incident, I doubt whether I was sick enough to have photographed it.

My very first airshow was a blazing hot day in the middle of 1981 (might have been 82) anyway, I was then ten or eleven when we (me dad and me) visited what is now east midlands airport. i remember well the vulcan making the ground shake during its steep takeoff 😀

My all time favorite airshow moment was on that day too, it got me hooked! I remember the comentator saying ‘and if you all look to the right hand side of the airfield you will see the lightning aproaching’…..
Well, I’d never seen a lightning before so i had no idea what was about to happen.
There was this black smudge just above the horizion with a little silver thing attached at the front, i remember thinking it looked like a meteorite, glinting and shining with a tail of smoke behind it. It was traveling like one too! And then it came… streaking across ths the airfield. I have a vivid memory of it going past us virtualy silent, only making this little whistling sound… she pulled up hard and by the time it was just a dot amongst the clouds, BAMM…! the sound hit us! i jumped out of me skin!! 😮 I was amazed that something so big and heavy could be traveling faster than it’s own noise it was making, Fantastic! 😀
We spent the whole day there but those are the only two things i remember.

Kenb’o

Mine must have been when I was very young at Cranfield – I reckon it was a model show but the Barnstormers were performing – remember the orange and blue livery vividly and the limbo…think there was an ‘evil’ character too that was chased off….cant have been very old, maybe 5-6! Other than that, probably an OW show, been going there with my dad since I was a baby (its a yearly pilgrimage -including retrieving free flight model aircraft from the spinney or across the road – through those orrible spikey bushes)- the barnstormers show is the one I remember ‘first’ though…

TT

First Airshow

Blackbushe, probably ca 1970, the Barnstormers put on an airshow, with their selection of Tiger Moths and Turbulents doing the flour bombing, aerial limbo under a string of flags (as reprised by Denny Dobson more recently). Visiting acts included a Vulcan. Some guy who I think was bille das “Colonel Crackshot” hung out of the side of a helicoopter and shot at balloons staked tot he ground. The “program” was printed on a single sheet of A5 sized pink paper, which sufferred badly when the weather turned sour and it poured down. Strange the odd things you remember after thirty five years.

As Propstrike says:

Booker 1976, with all the residents flying, and there were loads in those days. Two Spits, Fiat G46, two Rapides, Yak 11, Aces High film replicas, Peter Phillips in the BA-4, and more. The commentator announced he had a surprise, and behold, Don Bullock cames scorching over the M.40 in the all-silver B17.

– I was there too, that first pass by the B17 is etched in my memory, not least becaus eof the consternation it caused in all the blokes “using” the hedge it flew over without warning at zero feet – I guess many had wet shoes as a result 😉 . It may well have the first airshow appearance the B17 made? There was also a “massed” mixed-biplane formation, assorted tigers, Jungmanns etc. Not my first airshow, but definitely one that sticks in my memory too. Must dig out the photos and scan them in.

Found it.

This description here from

www.harpercollins.co.uk/Resources/extracts/ex_ch1_essential_clive_barker_barker.pdf

In May of 1956, as a four-year old, I was taken to an air show at Speke
Airport, on the outskirts of Liverpool. It was a big event. The city was
still getting out of its post-war doldrums, and entertainment was hard
to come by. I have a very clear memory of what happened that day, a
memory sharpened by the process of describing it in the drafts of this
piece, and by several conversations with my father, who also plays a
significant part in these events. I remember the heat of an intemperate
day, and a tiny car filled with people. My parents; my aunt and uncle,
my cousin, still a babe in arms. The air was stagnant, the sky blindingly
bright. The family, lacking the wherewithal to get everyone inside the
airfield so as to watch the fly-bys from the tarmac like the paying crowd,
was parked at the edge of a cornfield close to the perimeter fence. I was
bored, I think; the periods of waiting between the passing of the planes
seemed interminable. My shirt stuck to the back of my neck; there were
summer wasps buzzing around, coming after our sandwiches.

The high point of the afternoon’s entertainment was to be a flight
by a much-celebrated Bird Man. His name was Leo Valentin, and his
performance, which had been seen throughout Europe (the man was
French) was this: he jumped from a circling plane and glided on
home-made balsa wood wings until he reached a certain altitude, at
which point he pulled his rip-cord and parachuted to earth.

Our families waited through the heat of the afternoon for this last
part of the show to begin, my father doing his best to interpret the words
of the announcer on the airfield loudspeaker. Was that the Frenchman’s
plane: that tiny dark dot up there in the wide, empty sky? (This was
the fifties; the sky was emptier then.) Yes, that was the plane, because
look, there was Leo Valentin tumbling out, an even tinier dot. My
uncle helped me follow him, explaining what I was seeing; but it didn’t
interest me very much. I was too hot and tired; too distracted by the
wasps. And the spectacle, such as it was, seemed so remote, so undramatic.
It required an adult’s comprehension of the risks this man was
taking to make the diminishing shape of the plane and Valentin’s
tumbling form seem significant.

I think my aunt began to panic first, her voice shrill. My uncle
attempted to calm her, but her distress simply grew, as she watched
the Bird Man descend.

Vaguely I began to understand what was happening. Something
was wrong with the trick we were here to see. The man up there in
the sky wasn’t flying the way he was supposed to: he was falling.
Was there any concern being expressed by the voice on the airfield
loudspeaker? Perhaps; I don’t remember. But I do remember the
mounting panic of the adults, a panic not simply fuelled by the fact
that Valentin was dropping out of the sky, but by their growing comprehension

that he was going to hit the ground very close to us.
I think my mother must have taken me back to the car at this
point. Certainly my next memory is the hot confines of the vehicle,
and my mother instructing me not to look. This was a sight I must not
see. You can imagine what a goad to my curiosity that was. Something
was about to happen so terrible I was forbidden sight of it.

‘Don’t look,’ my mother said, over and over. ‘Don’t look. Don’t
look. Don’t look.’ My aunt was also in the car (perhaps she’d preceded
us there) and my baby cousin was bawling in her arms.

In the confusion I defied my mother’s repeated edict, and looked
out towards the cornfield. My father and my uncle were standing at
the edge of the field, their hands cupped over their brows to shield
their eyes from the blazing sun, watching Leo Valentin plummet to
his death.

(The image of a man falling out of the sky, his body and his
ambitions dashed against the earth, is one that trails mythologies, of
course. But it would be many years before I learned the story of Icarus,
or read Paradise Lost. All I knew at that moment was the panic, and
my hunger to see what the men out there were seeing; the thing I was
forbidden.)

I was denied it, however. Probably my mother averted my eyes at
the last minute, though it’s unlikely I would have seen much. A blurred
form dropping out of the blue, with the silk plume of a parachute
following behind. It would have meant nothing.

My father, on the other hand, saw it all, and was one of the first
to reach Valentin’s body. I asked him about it, much, much later. He
is a plain-spoken, pragmatic man, not given to waxing poetic, but when
he answered my questions his vocabulary grew dreamy and evocative.
The Bird Man’s body, he said, had made a shape from the flattened
grain, and he lay with his wings spread wide, so that it looked as though
an enormous bird had fallen to earth. Of course they knew he was
dead, but they turned him over anyway, I suppose to be absolutely sure.
His face, my father told me, was not bloody, though a newspaper piece
I later found about the accident speaks of ‘severe head injuries’. His
eyes were closed.

Perhaps, for completeness’ sake, I should tell you how the tragedy
came about. That flight, on May 21st 1956, was to have been Leo
Valentin’s last; he’d been experimenting with the technology of unaided
human flight since 1950, when he’d made his first jump at Villacoublay,
and was now, at thirty-seven, ready to pursue a safer avenue of work.
He was a superstitious man. He had asked for Room 123 at the hotel
where he’d stayed (that was the number he called out before jumping);
he would let no hands touch his wings but his own. Nobody is entirely
certain what went wrong, but the favoured theory is that his wings
clipped the plane as he jumped. He started to spin, and the damage
to his wings prevented his controlling the descent. He attempted to
open his parachute but it caught in the fractured wings, and candled.

Moggy

The first airshow I can remember was at RAF Acklington after we returned from Singapore in 1962. I remember it because those were the days when a silver Lightning would fly, un-announced, along the length of the runway at what looked like zero feet and then go ballistic with full re-heat and a nice loud boom. Not quite a supersonic boom but loud enough. :p The one and only way to open an airshow.

Brian

Farnborough 1957. SR.53, P1A, P1B, FD.2, mass flypast of Gannets, Accountant, umpteen test-bed Canberras, Student, etc., etc.

Like Melvyn described in “the other aviation monthly” recently, my first airshow memory is of John Fairey’s then dark blue Spitfire G-AIDN, at Staverton in the early 70s. Also remember the Lancaster there before it grew a top turret, and the RNHS Sea Fury, the much missed TF956.