You can also pay a whole extra fiver for a flightline tour and get REALLY close – well worth it, says I.

Hoping to be there myself, but I can’t remember whe I’m supposed to be in Scotland. You”re unlikley to be able to miss me as I’ll be carrying a selection of entirely unsuitable cameras, and probably talking utter c**p…

Adrian

ETA Drat! Will be in Scotland… Still, saves you from the misfortune of meeting me. There are unlikley to be many trade stands in my (limited) experience, but they are usually fairly relevant and you can get Charles Wells Bombardier on site as well. It’s a whole different ethos at OW!

Delta Aviation obviously doing a roaring trade in trips over Oxford, as I must have seen the Dragon Rapide a couple of dozen times heading there and back. Quite useful – if I hadn’t stood up straight to watch it go over every few minutes, I might have seized up bent over!

(I was digging the allotment. Go wash your mind out with soap!)

Adrian

Try Youtube – I recall a series called “Classic Bikes, probably on Channel 4 – for footage of a rotary-engined bike.

Adrian

The rotary produces it’s own flywheel effect and was a lot smoother than many of it’s early contempories.

Given that I believe the rear cylinders of the BE2’s engine (sorry, exactly what engine that was currently escapes me) were machined with much greater tolerances than the forward ones, because they got so much hotter, I can well believe that the easily-cooled rotary was smoother. The BE2’s motor must have piston-slapped like ******y until it got hot!

Adrian

The sea mist was heavy and you could just make out the other end of the beach with bino’s. What it was like for the pilots ????.

I’ll try to dig out a couple of pics tonight (on the home PC) of haze at sea. If you ever lived near it, you’ll have seen ships sailing in the sky plenty often enough to realise that haze over the sea, especially on a blue-sky day, does some very alarming things to the horizon. And water hurts if you hit at flying speed.

Adrian

Hunter spotted heading SE-NW over Port Meadow, Oxford, at about 8pm Saturday 26th. Appeared to be in an all-over dark scheme, but wouldn’t like to take bets on it as it was against the brightest part of the sky.

Adrian

Ooops… smiley bypass!

I am a nasty person but in this case I was assuming that most of this forum would think of Dad’s Army. Sorry if I’ve caused offence. 😮

Adrian