Well they’re a darn sight better than my murky, blurry attempts! Great stuff.

Quite. Today was quite gusty, with squalls often dodgy visibility. No amount of airmanship, good or bad, can totally cancel out unexpected changes in conditions, especially in an old aircraft with a temperamental and somewhat unresponsive powerplant. To just blindly accuse the pilot of error, especially before the circumstances are all known, seems pretty out of order to me.

Graham: thanks for the clarification about the engine controls. The Tripe did sound rough compared with the Pup it was flying with though! Several audible coughs and puffs of smoke during the display. It may have had no significance, but it did seem worth a mention.

Some thoughts as an observer:

The pilot was side-slipping into land, and caught the barbed wire fence on the far side of the airfield with the undercart-IMO he was lucky to be in the Tripehound as the extra wing seemed to stop the a/c tipping over on its back.
PA came over to say he was fine and pretty well unhurt within about 5 mins, with emergency services on the scene pretty quickly.
I did wonder whether the Tripe had engine troubles; it seemed to be running pretty rough once or twice during its pairs routine with the Pup. As he was on finals, I thought that the engine had cut as the approach was very quiet-but about 2 seconds before the prang a short burst of power was applied-clearly the pilot had power and began to react to the situation.

While it wasn’t quite enough I think that push on the throttle might have saved it from being much worse-it seemed like only a portion of the wheels struck the fence, and if more of the a/c had hit it then things might have got ugly..

The bottom of the cowling was pretty mashed, with cylinder heads sticking through it, and the prop was matchwood, so I think we might not see the Triplane for a while.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/nS5Cvs]

[url=https://flic.kr/p/nS5pVi]

[url=https://flic.kr/p/o9tNMm]

The BE2s were wonderful, and together with a super (whistly!) display by N3200 really made the day for me, despite weather often bordering on the foul.
In 17 years of airshow going that’s the first accident I’ve seen-I think I may have been lucky…

It’s £20 advance, I seem to remember it’s usually about £24 or £25 on the gate 🙂

Fantastic shots, thanks everyone! Really looking forward to seeing the Gladiator duo at OW on Sunday.
On a Mercury-related note- any news on the Blenheim front? It all seems to have gone very quiet since the first engine run and I was worrying that they might have hit some unforseen technical obstacle…

That looks seriously impressive. Well done to all concerned!

Looks like a lot of work has been done, I guess there was a large amount of nasty corrosion to deal with?
Peter – do you know if they’ve sourced front/mid-upper turrets or is it going to be restored to its MR scheme?