As has already been mentioned the advantage with staying on the ground, for an A/C, is that non aero engineers could do the work ;(it doesn’t even need an mot); the thing would have to be literally falling to bits, before your average HSE type would notice. If the wiring has been removed lower spec wiring could be used in all but the most heat sensitve places; screened or shielded wires need not be used. And most contentiously, taxi runs could earn some revenue ,for another try in the future, I don’t think that the two Vulcans are near enough to each other to be regarded as competition for funding at taxi run events.

I’ve registered with the councils site but can’t find an aplication that relates to the air field ; found several for the museum, an aplication no. would be helpfull.

Cees. it is several years since I spoke to Stan Grainger (the chap in question) ,I was given to understand that, that was the only one they had , but that is not to say the only one in existance ,( or that since my conversation with him that they have not aquired another).

They said 420,000 (whether that was for both days I don’t ); if everybody gave a £1, I think they would have been happy;

Ben , don’t know much about geography, don’t know much about archaeolgy, don’t know much history, almost everythings a mystery, but what a wonderful world this
could be. (with acknowledgements to Sam Cooke)
Hegels Dialetic eh, I’m sure modern medicines can cure that!!
Btw they wouldn’t let me in the door marked “revisionism in history”, I wonder why…

Steve P, I think the key word in your post is “IF” ;it was mentioned in the news a few months ago that our govt was unhappy about the amount of school time devoted to teaching pupils about ww2, they thought that too much time was given to this subject. With this attitude in mind how do you see the overall awareness in 2045, given our cultural mixture as a result of imigration from countries of the middle east? If you were to go out on the streets in Londons east end, and ask a hundred people what the Blitz meant to them, you would find that a huge amount of people weren’t in this country even 20 years ago, and the Battle of Britain ,the Blitz ,the bombing of Coventry, rationing etc etc haven’t even been heard of. A friend of mine recently said he thought that “D-day” was Hitlers second attempt at invading England and he’s 40, lived here all his life ,and his parents are from London!!

“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to commit the mistakes of the past” Not an exact quote but you get the idea.

JDK . this is a subject ,that you probably know more about than me, however my basic ethos has always been challenge everthing, and 30 odd years of doing so, leads me to believe, that is the right approach. If you were to look at the plundering of the “pyramids” as an example, and what drove the expeditions to discover and recover such artifacts ,you would probably find that financial gain would top the list then notoriety, followed by a genuine desire to record and display, and subsequently learn from this lost civilisation; I would say that all of the above reasons drive people to recover”artifacts” from more modern history. Thus as a collective mentality we have changed very little in a hundred years; who’s to say that in another hundred anything will be different. If left where they were the ceramics and the precious metals and gems would never deterioate, even if left at the bottom of a loch or else on the side of a mountain, and so a case could be made for leaving some sites untouched (other than the obvious pilfering of exposed sites). Aircraft left in similiar places will not survive, Spitfires are almost exclusively made from Alclad which is a “laminate of aluminium and magnesium,with the magnesium as a central core ,essentially protected by a thin layer of aluminium, as corrosion is basically advanced oxidisation, and there is oxygen in water,(certainly down to depths deeper than found in a loch), you have to say that the enviroment exists for deteriotion to occur. How many wrecks have been totally destroyed by boat anchors dragging through them? quite a few. The other matter for consideration is war graves, these are protected, and rightly so ,but for how long ; its perfectly acceptable to dig up roman centurians, bog dwelling ancient Britons, and indeed people from the victorian age, how much time must elapse before it becomes acceptable to recover war grave material? both the A/C and their occupants; you could argue that, it is that which we leave untouched for future generations.