Like a cross between a laptop computer and a modern mobile ‘phone. You can’t phone anyone on it, or type properly (as it doesn’t have a keyboard). The only bit of technology that it’s obviously superior to, in my view, is the Kindle. Still, people buy them, so they must be useful somehow…

Better get back to aviation, before we get onto Jamie Oliver 🙂

Is this Firefly the one to be restored to static or flying condition ?

I believe SE-BRG was supposed to be the flier, and the reclusive SE-CAU was the static frame. Can’t help hoping that with the Blenheim and Spitfire Is out of the way, ARC might finally get around to this wonderful machine soon. I’d love to see a Firefly bombing down the flightline at Legends. Just imagine if they painted in BPF markings and flew it with the Seafire III…

You’ve hit on many good points which would definitely improve museums as viewing experiences, and I’ve often thought the same.

Rightly or wrongly, museums also have a perceived duty to retain all the artefacts that they every acquire, in perpetuity. For me, this lies at the root of most of the problems you outline. Every posthumous bequest, every “seemed like a good idea at the time” acquisition tends to be retained because it seems churlish to memory of the departed donor, or to belittle the efforts of past volunteers, to do otherwise. This obviously has both good and bad ramifications. A huge amount of aviation history has been preserved because of far-sighted individuals who have held onto stuff which seemed to have no use at the time. The unlikely survival of aircraft like the prototype Mosquito is a great example of where this has been spectacularly successful, but on a lesser scale, excavated wreckage of extinct types, medals or other mementos with poignant and unique stories to tell, and well-presented factual displays turn a museum from a blank building full of aircraft into a proper learning experience
On the other side of the coin, this “exhibit hoarding” drives exactly the problems you’ve mentioned: excessive duplication of types between museums, crowding of space with clutter of mixed relevance, and unique or super-rare types being left to rot in the rain.

For example I’ve seen museums donating hangar space to (inaccurate and shoddy) full-scale replicas of Spitfires, endless and diverse collections of mediocre and old plastic models, and repeated collections of salvaged wreck parts from multiple examples of common types, where rare or highly relevant types remain outside and in poor condition, because the volunteer workforce is too thinly-spread to protect them. Type duplication can also be a result of collecting policy back in the formative days of aviation preservation: witness the rash of Super Mysteres, Vampire T11s, T-33s etc in museums, while aircraft like the Valetta or Beverley teter on the brink of extinction.

Short of appointing some kind of benign historic aviation dictator with power to compulsorily push museums around, it’s hard to know what to do about it. You can’t force anyone to look at the national scale, decide that their Vampire T.11, plastic Spitfire or Jet Provost is a waste of space, and sell it to the scrapman to bring that Scimitar under cover…

Love the enormous queue up the steps to get the tiniest glimpse into the B-47!

Wonderful shots, thanks for posting!

It’ll be interesting to hear how it flies. I read with some amusement Eric “Winkle” Brown’s assessment of its predecessor, the D.520:

It was a nasty little brute. Looked beautiful but didn’t fly beautifully. Once you get it on the ground, I was told not to leave the controls until it was in the hangar and the engine stopped. You could be taxiing toward the hangar and sit back when suddenly it would go in a right angle

Out of interest. does the “Complex” category apply to any other current UK historics? I’m thinking that the Canberra PR9 and Sea Vixen would have roughly comparable airframe/systems complexity to the Vulcan.

/ Exactly – and it’s very easy not to put anything particularly compromising on it at all.

For my sake, I find it a peerless way of keeping up occasional contact with a large number of people whom I might have otherwise slipped away from, and following causes and projects that I’m interested in. For another couple of examples to add to what Bruce said, via Facebook I can tell that the Mosquito prototype had its cowlings fitted in the last week, or that Gatwick Aviation Museum’s new building is more or less finished, or even see a series of handmade bone knives given by a repatriating prisoner of war to crew members of HMS Formidable, and now in the possession of the Fleet Air Arm Museum.

Nasty organisation? Sure. The way it sells privacy of those who are imprudent enough to trust it with their secrets is pretty execrable. It can also certainly be used for nasty ends, witness “Britain First”.
But modern life is full of partly or wholly nasty organisations. Ever tried a week of avoiding Google, Nestle, Coca Cola, Starbucks, Microsoft, Tesco? You’d have to live in a cave. And Facebook is also full of good people using it for good ends. Not a simple black-and-white issue, if you ask me.