For my sins I ended up listening to Farage’s show on LBC, coming live from… errrr… Washington. Talk show radio seems to be the perfect habitat for him. He’s clearly trying to make a name for himself in the US now, which reinforces my opinion that he’s really only interested in himself. Those good people of Thanet and the like who put their faith in him because he wasn’t a career politician should perhaps reflect on this. While Farage claims the Brexit vote as a personal accomplishment, he’s leaving the heavy lifting up to others and letting UKIP quietly implode.

What a stupid statement.

I don’t consider it stupid. I can walk in off the street at Hendon and not pay a penny, so the notion of volunteers working there makes sense. Duxford demands the best part of twenty quid from me, so it seems entirely reasonable to assume they can pay all of their staff. If you are good at something, never do it for free.

Can’t see why that should perplex you, Meddle. It might not be a “sexy warbird”, but we sold several hundred of them.

It is simply a matter of my prejudices. The Bristol Freighter was slow and ugly in service, and shipping one from the other side of the world seems like a waste of money, in my prejudiced opinion of course. There is something about seeing one sitting next to Concorde as the twin pinnacles of Bristol’s contribution to aviation that I find darkly amusing…

There you go if its not an american type no interest in saving it.

Don’t you mean: if its not a Spitfire (there is) no interest in saving it?

I read today that RR stopped supporting the Tyne, so no chance of the Belfast flying out of there either way?

If another crew/aircraft did something similar, it would be roundly criticized in this forum instead of being acknowledged with a wink and a nod.

An interesting thought. I doubt many, if any, (British, at least) historic aircraft operators would be roundly criticised on this forum. After all it is the general public, and the press in particular, that have a problem with historic aviation. The press probably see it as suitably rich pickings; a weirdy beardy hobby to be roundly discouraged.

A gloomy thought but I do wonder who, if anybody, will care about the Vulcan in eighty years. For people of my parents’ generation it is an icon of sorts. One of my colleagues grew up a stone’s throw from Woodford, and saw white Vulcans circuit bashing on the regular. Likewise my father had a model Gloster Javelin dangling from his bedroom ceiling, and remembers being woken up by a solo Javelin circuit bashing somewhere (?) in the wee small hours when he was a very young boy. My Father didn’t really maintain an interest in aircraft (in his world, engines and railways rule the roost, followed by buses, with aircraft taking a distant third place), but if I show him any aircraft of his era he tends to identify them correctly! There seems to be something infectiously optimistic in watching old Pathe Newsreel footage of the Farnborough displays of the ’50s and ’60s. The weird experimental aircraft, or the polished silver of the new jet fighters and bombers. All this sort of thing clearly instilled a sense of pride in people; a pride that sometimes oversteps the mark. I had somebody tell me earlier today that the Nimrod AEW 3 project was, like the TSR-2 before it, an example of British ingenuity and engineering superiority killed off by a decidedly un-British government hell-bent on destroying UK industry and innovation by persistently brown-nosing the US and their demonstrably inferior aircraft. A similar sentiment seems to exist buried on the VTTS Facebook page, whereby certain commentators are convinced that the UK government still hates UK industry and aviation heritage otherwise they would step in and fund 558, getting her back in the air pronto.

For my part I grew up just north of the Central Belt in Scotland, and remember seeing Tornados and Hercules operating fairly often in the vicinity. The latter especially seemed to make low passes through the local valleys and glens fairly regularly. I would also see a fair amount of GA traffic from Scone and Strathallan, as well as the occasional stray glider from Portmoak. My older brothers went to the museum at Strathallan fairly frequently, and between us we had Airfix Chipmunks, Tornados, Jaguars, Concordes, Spitfires dangling from our bedroom ceilings. A visit to Edinburgh would often translate into a visit to East Fortune, which is where I learned of the existence of Vulcan Bombers. It seems that even in the interim two decades since then the RAF has shrunk, and with it kids aren’t really being exposed to aircraft in the same way. A trip to the airport these constitutes little more than being treated somewhere between cattle at a market and a prospective terrorist suspect. At one point it was considered a fun day out to go to Edinburgh Airport to visit the airside-facing cafeteria and eat scran while watching aircraft for a couple of hours! What happened to that? All gloomy stuff.

I think there is a core nugget of interest in aviation, especially in boys, but it has to compete with Minecraft, Drones, basic programming in C++ and the full gamut of social media, happy slapping, revenge porn, Pepe memes and everything else. The works! Do teenage boys still suspend Airfix creations from their ceilings? I read of people here recounting a childhood and adolescence spent pedaling to the nearby RAF base to merrily note down serials in a little book, and then maybe being given a tour by a kindly security warden or similar. A similar fun day out could be spent at the local scrappies picking over and jotting down the serials from piles of rotting fuselages, or pilfering instruments and parts from thrashed cockpits. Others joined their local ATC and were bounced around in the back of a transport aircraft or Chipmunk for their sins. All heady stuff, killed off in part by the dreaded helf ‘n’ safety. As a kid however I would have been pedaling to Leuchars to jot down serials, and my progeny will have to pedal up to Lossiemouth to chase the same thrills. Good luck getting within half a mile of anywhere dealing in aviation scrap metal these days; not that many of these places exist. When I was at school the ATC kids were taken up in a glider, and even that seems to have taken a kicking when maintenance moved from RAF to civilian hands and gaps were discovered in the requisite documentation. With all of this in mind, I do wonder about 558 lasting a full eighty years, when things have changed subtly in the last twenty and immeasurably so in the last fifty.

I’m not sure of the state of play in England, but up here in Scotland the Government has set a target of building 50,000 affordable houses by 2020. Presumably an airfield site is a gift to those wanting to build houses on the cheap, as the tricky part of grading and leveling the ground has already been done, and some of the infrastructure is already in place or at least near by. Do airfields count as ‘brownfield’ sites, and is there equivalent incentives for developers to build on them thus?

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I envisage a tricky situation for VTTS in the future. If Doncaster Robin Hood expands due to an increase in traffic then the Vulcan will be seen as a stumbling block, getting in the way of expansion. Conversely if Doncaster becomes a Prestwick-like basketcase in the future, then the Vulcan will also be thrown into jeopardy. Do we see 558 perpetually trundled to the periphery of an ever-expanding airport, or do we see it in a hangar in the middle of a housing estate, eighty years down the line?

Perhaps VTTS should cut their losses and start entertaining the notion of moving 558 by road? Might be tricky if they have just let go of all their engineers however.

I sense that the Bruntingthorpe argument can go on for ever. People seem to interpret Dr Pleming’s remarks about sweeping runways for FOD as some sort of dig at Bruntingthorpe whereas, on the face of it, I thought he argued the point quite well. I don’t share the rosy opinion many seem to have of Bruntingthorpe, so maybe that explains why I’m not so eager to see Pleming’s remarks in a bad light. I’ve never been to Bruntingthorpe myself, but I do wonder about the longevity of a collection of fast jets kept outdoors and kept alive by volunteers, on the edge of an airfield used as a chop shop (there’s a bad omen!) and with the spectre of the dreaded developers looming in the background. ‘Brunty’ might have been a good move in the short-to-mid term but, as Pleming highlighted, 558 has to remain knocking around for another eighty years.

With regards to ‘rollgate’, I thought Pleming did a brilliant job of confirming that it happened without confirming a thing. I admire his way with language; he framed the issue as being basically between the two pilots and the CAA, and he was personally concerned that an airframe inspection would wind up delaying the second UK farewell tour! Dan O’Hagan pointed out that the roll was performed in poor taste, merely six weeks after Shoreham, and again Pleming somehow swept that accusation away as well.

Pleming cited the Red Bull setup at Salzburg as the sort of thing VTTS ultimately want to achieve. Again I had a couple of thoughts about this. Firstly the sort of aircraft they work on and operate at Salzburg are (and admittedly I’m not an aircraft engineer) rather less high tech than Cold War-era fast jets. It seems that 558 would ultimately be grounded when the engines became time-expired, regardless of OEM support. The difference between VTTS’s post-flying proposals and the Red Bull setup seems quite major. While Pleming asserted that the best place for these aircraft was in the sky, we know that 558 will never fly again, that the Swift will never fly and that the Canberra is some way off flying. This gives VTTS a museum of three aircraft, one of which might fly in the distant future. My second thought was: if Red Bull do such a good job, and have such deep pockets, why not reach out to them? The worst that happens is that we have to endure a Canberra plastered in Red Bull logos for a while. It worked out quite well for XP924, and surely cannot be any worse than the prospect of a basketcase “flying academy”, a museum with three aircraft or a Vulcan languishing in amongst a sewage farm somewhere on the perimeter of DRH for ever?

Finally, I do honestly wonder how many people want 558 to perform a ferry flight for the right reasons, and how many just want to be there with their big long lenses and rapid-fire shutter fingers so that they can grab some photos of the final final flight? I get the feeling some people just want 558 to be in the air again, for those dastardly OEMs to be proven wrong, for her to keep flying somehow in perpetuity….