Ditto: there is now a big gap in each day 🙁

“…an audit and examination…has confirmed the viability of the rebuilding of the initial early series XVII Bristol Hercules required for the HARS project as well as two engines for a European project.”

Is that the European project at Duxford then? The article mentions “[the] Bristol Beaufighter project of the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) and Robert Grienert’s Historical Aircraft Restorations Limited”, which would be two projects, so does it actually mean three?

Those who are disappointed certainly have a right to be so, but some of them may be missing a point…that is the aircraft participation wasn’t about doing an event at Duxford.
It was more about the experience of crossing the Atlantic, meeting up as part of a group, heading to France for the Douglas owners/ooerators/passengers.

Yes, they were happy to support the Duxford (and the Caen or Berlin “airshows”) events but that was not the raison d’etre for their long and costly flights.

This misses the point: read the DoD website (if it’s still up) and then you can see why folks feel a bit let down. This has nothing to do with weather either – an event was expected irrespective of that – access to the 23 being one I imagine. Not an airshow – an event. It matters not why the Daks were there: DoD touted the event – which was called “Daks Over Duxford” after all!!! Not, “Turn Up and We’ll See What Happens”.

So please don’t miss the point and focus on things that people aren’t even talking about (like it supposedly being expected as an ‘airshow’).

Apparently there’s a flock of observation kites at one airport, no idea which one.

Observation kites more appropriate to WW1 surely?

Not sure how you could say, “…the organizers did a fantastic job” when there wasn’t much to support the claim, as others have stated. The fact that there were 23 DC-3 (et al) was obviously the highlight but the execution fell short and squandered a once-in-a-lifetime event. It also matters little whether anyone thought this would be an ‘airshow’ (though I haven’t read anything to suggest that to be the case), since it most certainly WAS touted as an ‘event’, which I think, based on its title, “Daks OVER Duxford” might lead one to expect a little more airborne content of a Dak nature. Or more access. Or better publicity that some aircraft were open to public access and not turn away folks who only found out after midday and turned up 5 minutes too late!

The ‘blank moments’ (which I think are irrefutably due to, “so many heads of state flying around the South Coast and Normandy”) should not have affected an occasion which was mainly nothing to do with the people who caused the delays!!

I have to say I was disappointed by yesterday’s “Daks over Duxford” simply because there wasn’t much of the ‘over’ bit. Yes it was great to see 23 of various types on the ground, and that’s something I won’t soon forget. Ditto the attempts to do drops and see the kitted-up paratroops/re-enactors. There’s no way you’ll beat the weather, so no criticism there.

But when you had a 7-ship take-off (minus one, which returned with No.1 feathered shortly after take-off) with a justifiable expectation of a mass fly-by which doesn’t happen, then I began to feel a bit let down. The formation could be seen orbiting many times in the distance to the west/northwest, and from fellow spectators’ comments I was not alone in wondering when they would eventually do a flypast. That the resultant six-ship then returned some time later, peeled straight off and landed (so no flyby) left me and my neighbouring colleagues wondering what had just occurred. By the end of the day we felt a bit like bystanders at an event that was happening somewhere else.

OK I guess that if you have disparate groups of mainly volunteer organizations just by chance positioning their Daks at Duxford for a separate event (the D-Day flypast itself) then I guess it’s unreasonable to expect that they will be prepared to stump up for avgas just to do a further display at Duxford. However, that would then (to my mind at least) place the burden on IWM to make sure that any public expectations were addressed with clarity. Like not calling the event “Daks Over Duxford” and maybe just have more car parks open and treat it like a normal day?

So for me it wasn’t what it promised to be. I hope those who go today will get something befitting the name, whatever the weather throws at them.

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The ‘somersault’ was at Little Waltham (actually ‘Sheepcotes’, which may be a house/farm rather than location). See also newspaper report above.