What got you started in loving Aviation?

I am glad that everyone seems to be enjoying this topic. It was a good idea after all! 🙂

Cheers everyone for your confessions of aviations nuts. 🙂

Its only on this forum that all us obsessed aviation nuts can talk about this and be interested in each others’ stories. Lord knows, even our other half’s are not as interested 😉

One of my earliest memories of me is me toddling down the department store aisle toward the rack of Airfix kits, in those days in 1967/68 they were sold in plastic bags with the instruction sheet forming part of the packaging. I begged my parents to buy a kit for me but it wasn’t until a few years afterward that they finally relented and my mum helped me fix the Mirage jet and my brother’s F4U Corsair.

Books and comics on aircraft fueled my interest and plastic modelling came naturally. I pored over all my Airfix catalogs which are still a treasured collection until today.

Moving homes as often as I did meant that most of my precious models got broken and parts lost, and it was too heart-breaking to continue and also too little time to get really good at it.

When I started working, I discovered aviation art and decided that while I could not enjoy my models on displays, here was a ready-made picture, and many of them came signed by my childhood heroes too, and my love for aviation art was born in 1989.

Quitting my job and travelling to the UK to attend 10 airshows from Jul-Sept 1990 was a dream come true for me. My home is filled to the gills with aviation stuff, books, memorabilia, aviation art etc 🙂 I’m glad I have a tolerant and understanding wife who 😉

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I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in aviation. I am not sure what triggered it off all those years ago.

My parent’s house still has a surviving piece of my ‘wall art’; a small outline of a ‘plane which I doodled in pencil on the outside underneath the kitchen window!

This must have been sketched when I was about 4 years old and has survived to this day. 😀

Regards,

Paul

I have to say, i have my dad to thank. I was a RAF brat ! I remember spending most days at school looking out the window at the aircraft coming and going in places like Laarbruch, St Mawgan and Brize Norton to name a few and not getting a lot of work done. Apparently i had a concentration problem !
I was a Air Scout for a few years but then oddly joined the Sea Cadets, and a good time i had as well. Learnt a few thinks about life there i can tell you !

My family did a lot of airshows travelling a good few miles in dads red Maxi. And the roles are now reversed as i do most of the driving. We both are also involved in Buccaneer Restorations as well and i still spend as much time as possible trekking round after aeroplanes.

My Dad for me too! He took me to the shows at Wethersfield in the early 60s, and even had the presence of mind to take some photos! I’ve posted a few of those over the years.

Every now and again I’d nag him into taking me up to our local airport at Rochford and watched the old Channel Air Bridge Vikings and Daks IIRC as well as Bristol Freighters and subsequently Carvairs.

I remember being taken to a couple of shows at North Weald in the mid 60s too. As a result of his business connections, I was taken round the old BKS and Aviation Traders hangers at Southend (Rochford) around that time and remember seeing and sitting in the old BKS Brits, Ambassadors/Elizabethans and Viscounts. It was downhill from there really 🙂

My interests are now as much about photography as the aircraft and it’s a superb way to enjoy two hobbies at the same time. I still show my dad the pics and video I take each time I go to a display (I’m sure he’s truly fed up with most of the pics) and have tried to take him to Duxford for FL which I know he’d enjoy but, following a trip there a few years ago he says he can’t do the standing around any more. Still, I’ve a lot to thank him for!

CargoMaster

I was born a WW2 and military geek. I don’t know how that happened. My dad served in the Navy, but never talked much about it. My family isn’t really big on the military (though it seems all of the males have been in, they just don’t have anything to say about it), or flying, or anything pretty much. I used to watch Vietnam on tv as a little kid. I also used to watch World at War on tv. I remember being mad the night President Nixon resigned, because all three channels had that on and it preempted World at War. I built a ton of models, ships, aircraft, tanks, cars, everything. I went to an airshow in 76 or 77 and saw a Hellcat and an F-86. That was pretty cool. I used to like to go to the Bomber gas station in Milwaukee Oregon when I was a kid. When I was 17, I dropped out of school and joined the military. While I was in I met a pilot friend who was a member of the Barbours Point flying club. Besides having cessnas, they had a T-34. That was cool. We flew that plane alot. It still didn’t take hold in my head until…..

About two years ago, my friends kids were having a birthday party. I went to Toy’sR-US to get some presents for them. While there, I found a JU-87 Stuka model/toy. It’s pretty cool. I bought it, for me. That turned into “it would be cool to have an rc airplane JU-87″. That turned into ” I like FW-190’s better”. I bought plans, short kits, kits, pieces parts for everything from cessna 182 to fw190, joined the AMA, talked to folks, everything. It kinda dawned on me that to have the plane I wanted, I was gonna spend more than 5k, and then have to learn how to fly it. Then it dawned on me (slowly), that for that kind of money, I could probably be a pilot, and maybe fly these planes myself.(It’s more money, trust me). I went to an airshow near home, and met a cool Nasa dude/warbird owner, and asked about a ride on his T28. I’ve also rode on the Collings B17 and B24, during this time. I’ve met a lot of Warbird owners and enthusiasts. As of today, I’ve got 45 hours (getting close) and 9 hours in T28 B’s and C’s (not loggable,whaaa, whaaa,whaa). I’m the luckiest guy I know.

When I was 13, someone at school mentioned I could join the Air Training Corps and learn about aircraft and shooting and all sorts of exciting things that boys of 13 could do then. Popped over to Pendeford Airfield and enlisted shortly afterwards. That would probably have been in 1968/9.

For me, it was two relatives rather than one, but one of the two was Dad, who built balsa gliders and the like; the other was my cousin Don who lived with my parents while attending the local university (at which I now work) in the 70s, and who had recently obtained his pilot’s licence…

Anyway, more or less simultaneously, around 1976 or so, Dad’s borrowed library books (on World War I aircraft, so he could get the paintscheme right on a Veron balsa Nieuport 27) piqued my interest and I began sketching SPADs and Fokkers et cetera (I’ve subsequently taken up aviation art as a hobby), and cousin Don arrived from Thunder Bay with his pilot’s licence and began every so often renting Cherokees and the like and taking members of my family up. This, to a kid of 11 or so, was the acme of cool…Then there we were, holding on a taxiway at Mt.Hope, and here was this big boxy twin-finned dark green thing rumbling away in front of us. Dad knew it was a Mitchell. (I wondered why they’d bothered putting two tails on it when surely one would’ve been sufficient!) It was, of course, CWH’s then-recently-acquired B-25J. Around the same time we noted the “CWH” signs on the walls of Hgr#4 at Mt.Hope; I still vividly remember peering through a little Georgian-glass window in one of the hangar “mandoors” and seeing the Firefly, a clutch of yellow Harvards, and (maybe) the Avenger. Didn’t really know exactly what these were…but I didn’t need to in order for The Bug to bite me bigtime at that moment…and once The Bug bites…the effect never leaves you! 😀

Great thread, this.

S.

I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, and although there were a few things I remember as a kid that I guess all just came together eventually, one early memory still stands out.

I was in the Cubs one year, when we got taken to Duxford for an airshow. I guess this would have been about 1977/78? I remember standing next to the coach we’d travelled in, and watching as a silent but very fast pointy thing (which I later learned was a Jaguar) came in very low from what is now the M11 end. As it got level with us, I suddenly heard it, but the sound was coming from where I’d first seen it. My eight year old brain had just enough time to start wondering why on earth that should happen, when the REAL noise hit me. I had never heard anything that loud or seen anything travel that fast. I decided there and then that I would love to fly in one, but even in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that fifteen or so years later in 1992, I would get my chance. 🙂

During the intervening years, lots had happened. I’d joined the Air Training Corps, had my first flight, decided I would become a fighter pilot, started to learn about the exploits of The Few and The Dam Busters, and eventually ended up at RAFC Cranwell via a Flying Scholarship. Reading the history of the RAF, and realising the high standards that I may one day be called upon to live up to, my interest turned towards the vintage aircraft as icons of those distant days when life was far more dangerous than it is for us today. My appreciation for their efforts and sacrifices grew, and still does today.

I don’t know where the Desford is, if indeed it survives at all, but I can say for certain that it’s not at the Museum of Flight at East Fortune.

It was at Strathallan.
Dont know what happened to it afterwards though.
What got me going was a book I had as a pre school kid called “Pete The Pilot”, which I still have, being hoisted up into the fuselage of a derelict Shackleton at Kinloss fire dump ( subsequently revisited this around 1981-its long gone now), and visiting Turnhouse and marvelling at the rotating propellers of the many Viscounts there.Its in my blood now-an itch you cant properly scratch, but when something powered by a Merlin roars over-it feels soooooooooo good!

My interest started in the late 60’s when we lived in Hounslow, under the flightpath for Heathrow, and then when we moved to in the early 70’s. Lost interest in my teens when I discovered the 3 B’s, then it was rekindled in 1984 when I attended my first Duxford. It just continued from there although I don’t have much of an interest in Modern Airliners or Military jets anymore.

Well it all started with my parents. My mum’s mother used to work for deHavillands which got her interested and living in Edgeware she used to get alot of aircraft from the Hendon Airshow fly over. This led to trips to Heathrow with her father when it was all tents. Then she moved to Bracknell and met my dad who was ex-RAF and into planes. Dates at Heathrow followed. Then in 1971 I came along. Regular trips to Heathrow as a baby and then on the back of the bike to Blackbushe were the norm. Saw the first commercial flight of Concorde and the Blackbushe airshow in 1977 and from then on I was hooked. Even by ’77 I could identify different aircraft. Then I started to grow a fascination with the Lightning. I remeber about 1980 my parents giving me an exercise book full of pictures they had cut out of Lightnings from various places – this become a prized possesion.I came across a book at school called Thunder and Lightnings ( by Jan Mark ) which was about a young Lightning enthusiast and since then I’ve read it loads of times. By the early 80’s it was IAT at Greenham Common ( the first time I saw a Lightning for real! ) then the old Abingdon Battle of Britian shows before I was old enough to start going further a field. Binbrook was the place to get to – know how do you do it? Thats easy, cycle to the station, train to London, cycle across London, Train to Newark, Train to Market Rasen, cycle to Binbrook. Anybody who tells you Lincolshire is flat should try those hills between Market Rasen and Binbrook. Watching from the fire gate at Binbrook was never a pleasant experiance, it was ALWAYS cold, wet and windy. I used to look on at the lucky people in there nice warm cars with envy. More than once I decided to take refuge in the ditch that ran along the end of the runway by the road and watch them come in over my head. After the Lightnings died my interest fell away until I moved to Cambridge in 1994. Living so close to Duxford and Mildenhall it would be rude not to go. From then on its been full steam ahead!

I have no idea, I can remember drawing aeroplanes at primary school, but also cars. It’s just grown from there.

I think I’ve always been into aircraft in one way or another – but do remember sitting in East Fortune’s Spitfire at some point! 😀

What got me started? I honestly have no idea, but it’s been there since I was four or five. I was reading at a very early age but very reluctant to walk. (Hasn’t that one come back and bit me in the ass!) By the time BoB reached the big screen I even knew the 109’s weren’t, which confused the hell out of my Dad. It’s been there ever since in various forms. Now, through my health, or lack of it, my interest has redoubled and led me down roads I never thought I’d travel.

That’s it, the rest of the story is best saved for the how do I explan I’m an anorak thread.

regards,

kev35

Like most postings here, its Dad’s fault! He was a 13 year old lad in the Battle of Britain and lived on Romney Marsh and witnised the fighting going on overhead. I grew up with his stories, then one day the filming started and once again he was watching HE111’s, ME109’s (Buchons) Spitfires and Hurricane’s overhead (plus a B25 & the odd Helicopter) but with me at his side! we watched the filming for weeks and eventually saw the film.

I read all of Dad’s books and made all the Airfix kits, eventually learning to fly and still take Dad up for a ‘jolly’.

I sail as well & own a 25ft Sailing boat, christ knows where that passion came from……… :rolleyes:

Bloody Biggles………… 😀 He has a lot to answer for :diablo:

When I was five, my parents took me to an airshow. To this day, almost 35 years later, I still vividly remember a Hkp 2 (ie Alouette II) picking up a bucket of water with one of the skids, moving the bucket, and then putting it back on the ground, all without spilling one drop of water! (at least according to my memory!)

After that demonstration, I was lost. There was nothing else I wanted to do, talk about or hear about than aeroplanes and helicopters. Building models (and then blowing up quite a few of them!) became the next thing. When I was about ten, I began collecting aviation books and magazines. After that, writing and researching. I thought about learning to fly, but I could never afford it back then.

Looking back on it, aviation history has enriched my life immeasurably. I’ve written several articles, and is currently trying to compile my first book (the subject being the various Lao air forces 1955 until the present day). To me, aviation history is more than a hobby, much more than a pastime. But, I haven’t got an aviation-related job, that will most probably remain a dream.

Jan Forsgren
Archivist, National Railway Authority,
Gävle, Sweden

Visited Duxford in 84, got talking to a guy there who lived locally and who could drive me there every week and then joined DAS working initially on the Viscount. From there I got to meet a few people who have helped me out along the way to the point where I now spend most weekends on a small grass airfield in Norfolk helping out where I can…

Lived at RAF Waddington in the 1950s during my formative years (my father was a Flight Sergeant in 61 Sqn) and then joined the RAF myself.