It’s interesting to watch older folks harking back to the “good old days”-invariably the airshows that they went to as a child.
For me in my early twenties, the days of the 1950s and 1960s are as distant as the age of dinosaurs, the first airshow I went to was RIAT 1997.
However, even in my 15 years of airshow attendance, it’s noticeable that shows featuring modern military aircraft (RIAT in particular) aren’t what they were when I started going. I remember walking with my dad along what seemed like miles of static displays, with multicoloured C-130s of every concievable nationality, walk-through C-5s aplenty, and apparently endless Phantoms, KC-135s, F-16s, Mig-29s and Tornados.
Nowadays participation by air forces generally seems to have shrunk to a shadow of its former self, and airshows like RIAT have relentlessly diversified to attract punters of different ages
and shorter attention spans: fairground rides, pop singers and simulators seem to me to be taking the place of wierd and wonderful static displays.
Contrary to that, Hampden 98 is right, the historic scene is ever-growing, and I feel priviledged to have witnessed a veritable explosion of new restorations take to the display circuit. When I was a child there was no Vulcan, Meteor T.7, Demon, etc even if I had been able to go and see them. So it’s also been a real joy growing up, gaining independence and being able to travel farther afield, and immerse myself in shows that I could only dream of getting to as a child, like Classic Jets at Kemble, Flying Legends and of course Shuttleworth on a fine summer evening.
Not all has changed for the worse, but I do think it’ll be interesting to see what airshows look like 50 years down the line, when I can muse on threads like this about how great things were in the ’90s and ’00s!
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