Not the only QRA airfield. You forgot RAF Leuchars.

Quite right, mea culpa. I must try to keep up to date with pointy jet things.

Ahhhh, like that was it?

Thank you, I am better educated about the Vulcan hydraulic system now. So the worst a serious hydraulic failure could cause would be a belly landing, assuming the gear blow-down feature failed too? Unless hyd fluid was pooling somewhere hot, naturally… so therefore you want to get down in a hurry.

VX – point taken about crosswind but still dashed bad form to black the QRA boys.

I see from the DSAF forum that the crew had a major hydraulic problem and had to blow the gear down – with hydraulic flying controls it was indeed smoking hole in the ground time if they didn’t get it on the deck quickly. As you were kev/bubbles/vx…

Thankful she didn’t land on someone’s head and just blacked the RAF’s only QRA airfield for several hours instead of disrupting some holiday makers flights for as long as it would have taken her to be towed off Doncaster’s runway.

Strange, if the fault developed during the practice over Cottesmore and she was seen legs a dangling over Stamford, where they initially trying to put her down at Wittering? Then going on to Coningsby instead of their home at Doncaster (only 26 miles further to fly in comparison to going to Coningsby – all of 10 minutes extra in the air?) it must have been something pretty serious – smoking hole in the ground serious.

Perhaps this is the appropriate moment to throw in the towel before there is something more worrying than the latest begging bowl deadline to meet.

This really is pitifully poor reporting from the BBC. Errors and typos in bold and unnecessary words in italics.

Fuel leak cancels Avro Vulcan at weekend airshows

Plans to fly a restored bomber plane at several airshows have been cancelled over a “technical problem”, its operators said.

The Avro Vuclan XH558 was scheduled to fly as part of weekend airshows in Bournemouth, Dawlish, Oxford and Shoreham.

The 59-year-old craft has developed a fuel leak in its tank.

It is managed by charitable group Vulcan To The Sky Trust, which is now repairing the plane.

Andrew Edmondson, from the trust, said: “We have every confidence that the problem is temporary.

“We have a ‘safety first’ policy which means we only ever fly the Vulcan if she is fully serviceable.”

Mr Edmonson said it costs around £2m a year to fly the XH559, and relies on fundraising and income from airshow appearances to fund it.

The XH558 first flew in 1952, and its restoration began in 1997 at a total cost of £7m.

It has been appearing at UK airshows since 2008.

Dawlish isn’t a weekend airshow. XH558 first flew in 1960. Why does “technical problem” need quotes around it? Don’t they believe the Vulcan people?

I actually assisted in a minor way with something on this film. It was clear from fairly early on that realism was of no interest to the people making it. This should have been apparent to the more attentive of this forum’s readers when the Hangar 11 P-40 returned to the UK in a rather cartoon style paint job (just cover the entire aircraft with dirt so it looks exactly like those really realistic CGI creations our graphics boys have made! Cool!).

Much of that was driven by cost – getting a B-24 to Europe for the filming obviously proved a bridge too far for instance, so Pink Lady was dragged away from retirement and given another year of flying courtesy of this production. As a warbird fan that’s a plus point to me so I’ll forgive B-17s instead of B-24s or B-25s; but painting them in the wrong colours is just lazy research. The various missions the Tuskegee boys went on are all well documented so when they show specific aircraft, e.g. 262s, then you can generally tie that to a specific raid – so why not get it right rather than wrong? In the budget of a big Hollywood movie, details like that cost next to nothing to get right.

The flight dynamics of the CGI creations are, of course, the aforementioned ‘clart’ no matter how many attempts are made to explain them away as hyper-realistic dynamics that merely look like utter crap because of the camera position. I particularly enjoyed how the only control surface that appears to move in any scene are the rudders.

None of the above will have any significant impact on the movie’s success, however; the rah-rah-rah stuff will go down well in the USA; the X-Wing fighters will keep the teenagers happy; the only thing that will hurt the movie is if it is truly a turkey. We only have a 2 minute trailer to go on, but I know I have formed my opinion from the bits of the script we do hear. You generally pick the best bits for the trailer, after all, so I guess they were struggling there.

Incidentally the post-production hell that is mentioned includes re-shooting lots of scenes after test audiences got mightily confused about what the hell was going on, and leaving at least one actor on the cutting room floor as his performance was so woefully awful. Not many movies become masterpieces after this amount of “fixing”.

Red fabric? Are you sure it’s not genuine Red Baron fokker?