The wind turbines are a couple of miles off the eastern end of the main runway. An annoyance but thankfully a respectful distance from the airfield.

The airfield is in surprisingly good condition. Most of the main runway is still intact although the eastern end is now dug-up. But the western end is much the same as it was when I was a kid. It’s also now possible to drive straight onto the airfield and onto the runway. The hangars are still in commercial use and the control tower has been renovated and is now a private dwelling. The main admin site is disused and tatty but still mostly intact.

Great old airfield where the mighty Varsities once chugged around… happy days.

No more photos anywhere??

Think it was just the one aircraft at Boscombe Down on acceptance trials that was painted silver/dayglow orange, n’est ce pas? Beautiful colour scheme though, I agree.

The early Dominie paint scheme featured a thin line of Light Aircraft Grey above the red fuselage stripe, but this disappeared in the 1970s. Then the Grey nose disappeared (post modification), and finally the ghastly black paint arrived. Surely the most colourful examples were the Cranwell machines with their blue fin bands?

I hope that the preserved examples lose that awful black paint scheme – it seems so inappropriate for an aircraft that served for decades painted red and white! Then again, if Cosford are to acquire a Dominie, why can’t they have one of the examples from the ground school? These are painted in “proper” colours and are also “proper” T1 aircraft with the original shorter nose. Give them a black machine and transfer one of the “real” Dominies to the museum, say I!

Did the final formation pass over Manby or Strubby? I would hope that these sites weren’t forgotten but then Stradishall was ignored…

Ahh, happy days, watching Dominies roar into the sky at Strubby while the Varsities squealed round the perimeter track. I seem to remember speeding through the old V-Bomber low level corridor with a navigator in the back of a Dominie, who is now better known for his connections with Key Publishing… Hate to think how long ago that was!

I do hope NAM get a Dominie. That would be astonishing if the dear ol’ Dominie didn’t find a place in NAM’s collection. Then again, you’d think Aeroventure at Doncaster really ought to have one too. Personally, if I lived in the beautifully-restored control tower at Strubby, I’d have to get a Dominie to park outside… there’s enough runway left to fly one in too (just!).

Far too much emphasis is placed on the White paper because (as is often the case with lazy journalism) it is easy to adopt the most simple account of events. Naturally, it’s far easier to simply claim that Britain’s defences were written-off at a stroke, instead of attempting to wrestle with the realities of the situation at that time.

In reality, it’s likely that many of the planned projects would have eventually been abandoned in any case and of course quite a few were not directly abandoned because of the White paper in any case. Aircraft such as the TSR2, Aldershot, P.1154 and so on, were separate issues which are often linked with the White Paper, even though they had no direct connection.

In reality, it was probably only the Lightning that was directly affected by the White Paper in that it stifled any further development of the aircraft. It was only a snapshot in time, and defence planning (and industry) soon re-organised itself.

Also worth bearing in mind that the Paper had some beneficial outcomes too. For example, it persuaded Hawker to stay out of the fighter business for a long time and encouraged Camm to pursue a rather unlikely STOL army liaison aircraft project… and we all know what became of that!

Seen as we’re evidently publicising TSR2 books yet again, I should add that my (Ian Allan’s) book is still widely available (and no, I don’t have any financial motive for mentioning it). According to the latest review in Aeroplane Monthly, it is “one of the best books of 2010” so I guess it ain’t bad!;)

I’d love to see an accurate map of the Sheffield raids. The house I currently live in was built just pre-war but at the end of the garden there’s an empty plot where a house must have stood – and to the side a couple of post-war houses have been built. I can only assume that this must have been the result of a stick of bombs, and as I’m only a mile from one of the Luftwaffe’s favourite targets (a railway viaduct next to Hillsborough football stadium), I think it must be likely that a fair few bombs fell here. But the newspaper map looked more like a “pin the tail on the donkey” game than an accurate account!

Indeed, decals only started appearing with separate red dots because modellers had asked for this for so long. Nothing more useless than a roundel with an off-centre red dot!