Interesting question, I suppose I got into this aeroplane thing seriously in 1984 when following a visit to Duxford as a teenager I joined the DAS to work on the Viscount. At that point I still didn’t really have an interest in aicraft but it was something to do at the weekends. My interest developed as the private collections developed. 5 years later I got to hear about a private collector locally who was having a Yak 11 built so I popped down there and ended up helping out one evening a week down there plus the occasional weekend, but most weekends were still spent at Duxford, now helping out with one of the collections there. This continued until the mid 90’s when I was offered the chance to do this sort of thing on a full time basis with a restoration company about 10 miles from home. I’ve since left there and taken up a normal job again but am lucky in that a friend of mine owns a collection of vintage aircraft so from time to time I pop up to his airfield and lend a hand.
I guess my earliest memory of aviation came from the 4 years I spent living a mile from the end of East Midlands runway and seeing the aircraft fly overhead on the approach, once a year they would have a display by the Red Arrows Gnats and they would overfly the village.
My first flight was a pleasure flight in a helicopter from East Midlands I suppose around 1975, my last (so far) was yesterday in a 172 to and from North Weald
Sign In
