That might explain a popularity with the younger voters, but I’m not so sure about the older members of society,
who have seen the major parties come and go over the years. ?

Since when was UKIP popular with younger voters? Not at this Northern latitude, and you cannot blame it all on whining Scots either as all the students up here in Edinburgh are English anyway. :stupid:

A friend of mine worked in one of the call centres for a while, and was tasked with phoning up individuals and asking of their favoured political party. A surprising number answered UKIP, but given that he was calling in the middle of the day we can safely assume they were either elderly or unemployed. UKIP does well (all things relative) in the more urban constituencies up here, which also happen to house greater numbers of immigrants and have a tendency to be more greatly deprived. Make of that what you will.

Some strange attitudes on here: this has nothing to do with rich people and Cessnas, or even decreasing GA use. We have lost much of the aircraft manufacturing base which not so long ago rendered hundreds of very successful civil and military aircraft.

My reference to rich people and Cessnas was a stab at droll humour. At one point in time it was the pinnacle of achievement to have a Bassett-Lowke railway running round your duck pond. Tastes change, and it would seem that fewer people fly for fun, else airfields wouldn’t be getting turned into wind farms and there wouldn’t be mossy Cessnas sitting in the weeds at any number of smaller airfields across the country.

The issue with Woodford seems to highlight two issues; the loss of a servicable airfield near Manchester and the loss of a historic site, both of which have their vocal supporters.

We have lost a manufacturing base, full stop. There is no point claiming this is exclusive to aviation. With that loss you lose the knowledge in repairing and servicing vintage equipment, firstly, and the wider culture that grew up around manufacturing and were exposed to British aircraft, cars, trains et al on a daily basis. Would a child in 21st century Britain be able to name five different aircraft currently used by the RAF? Would the average British child in the UK in the ’50s be able to do the same? My father has no great interest in aviation, but can name pretty much any cold-war era aircraft I put in front of him. Perhaps people of that era were more interested in machinery and technology as a whole? When you say the aviation industry ‘not so long ago rendered hundreds of very successful civil and military aircraft’, it feels long ago enough for me to consider it a lost art. You are looking at several decades of change from that golden era. I consider that enough time for the sale pitch ‘British-made aircraft’ to lose any sense of meaning on a global scale, and therefore it would be difficult to kick-start production again.

Is it madness or a hugely contracting aircraft manufacturing industry coupled with a decreasing use of GA aircraft?

You could argue that it is madness to preserve areas of land near large urban areas in aspic purely because some interesting aircraft were manufactured there 50+ years ago, because a (decreasing) handful of lawyers and doctors keep their Cessnas there, or because aircraft thundered down the now cracked and overgrown runways during WW2. If the only historic cues around Woodford happen to be a number of crumbling hangars, a peeling Vulcan robbed of parts and a couple of sheds full of models then you can understand why selling the land to developers seems like the better option. Short sighted it might be, but you cannot roll back the clock or suddenly expect younger generations to show a massive interest in a dying UK industry. As this forum routinely demonstrates, the UK aircraft ‘scene’ is underpinned by an ageing member base that spends more time chastising fellow members for mis-remembering minor details about aircraft (50+ years ago) than actively promoting or encouraging new interest amonst the lesser clued-up. Watching videos of engine runs on Youtube and I see white-haired old men scurrying around, it doesn’t fill me with much hope about the long term future of anything relating to historic aviation in the UK. Once that knowledge is lost, who is going to re-learn the startup proceedures for cold war jets, to give but one example? Who will be ground running Vulcans in ten years time? I was speaking to an acquaintance a couple of weeks ago who is working on re-developing the disused airfields in the North-East of Scotland to meet our energy needs in some capacity. Nobody appears to care about their history and rather they are viewed as an untapped resource. There is a lot of history that is going to be dug up in the next decade.

I sat in something at East Fortune when I was a kid. Don’t ask me what, but it was a cockpit section!

In the meantime, does anyone know of anywhere that might be interested in taking this prop? If not, it’ll be broken up and scrapped with all the rest of the junk in the yard.

I seem to recall a museum in lossiemouth, down by the harbour, that had lots of old objects in it. I think your nearest air museum is in Inverness. Otherwise, it would make an interesting garden ornament?

I’m angry because I missed John’s ****e in post 424 up there.:eagerness:

When you achieve maturity (and that can happen once real life, rather than cloistered childhood, kicks in,) you’ll realise that it’s really a silly waste of time.

I’ve often found those that spout the ‘once real life kicks in’ rhetoric are usually burnt out, jaded and have a personal history that reads like a catalogue of missed and wated opportunities. The sort of losers that put ‘university of life’ on their Facebook page under ‘qualifications’ because they think that making poor decisions and then living with the consequences makes them more worldly. These people tend to favour political ideologies that blames somebody else for their own fusionless existence, ala UKIP. :eagerness:

I trust you don’t fall into this category.

No, I wouldn’t expect those simplistic ideas would grab YOUR vote but, to many voters it would mean that somebody, somewhere, was intent on doing something – a little something – about reducing deficits amd attempting to rationalise and prioritise.

Snafu352’s post contains figures and referenced urls, both of which are (always) absent from your posts. Try harder.