Sunday 21 May

On Sunday the Shipping & Airlines Collection brought in some of their classics on the way back to Biggin Hill from Stow Maries.

A Yak 52 also arrived for this week’s Formation School at The Squadron.

Seafire has gone to Old Warden. Skyraider’s engine nearly finished, expect engine runs in next few weeks.

Vampire is not at North Weald.

Monday 1 May

The Spitfire PRXI was displaying again at the Royal Gunpowder Mills

Sunday 23 April

Gnats out again for training. Only managed to catch one sortie as I was in the Tower a lot of the day

Saturday 22 April

The Gnats were starting their annual work-up by getting their pilots current again. Both jets out for a couple of sorties.

The paperwork for the single-seater doesn’t yet weight as much as the aircraft, so will be a while yet!

25, 30, 31 March

On Saturday 25 March was had a visit from G-DOGG, the former RAF display Bulldog, which is also featured as the Airfix kit.

Our round bed by the Gate Guardian now sports a red, white and blue roundel made of flowers, The Hurricane vic sculpture was created by former Duty Officer John Ratnage.

The Hangar 11 Collection’s Spitfire PRXI went off to Leicester and White Waltham.

On Thursday 30 March we welcomed an airman who had served as a Plotter in North Weald’s original Control Tower, which was situated at the southern end of the main runway. Arnold Rey was at the Airfield from February to September 1950 before moving to RAF Sopley, near Ringwood. This was the R3 Sector Operations Control Room for the south of England, and part of the ROTOR early warning network. As a GCI station it had the wartime codename of Starlght. His duties were to use the radio direction finding equipment to plot the positions of aircraft on a special table and give bearings to enable them to return to North Weald. He remembers the Vampires flying and was pleased to know that one is still based here. We gave him a tour around the current Control Tower, which was not built until after he had been posted down south to Hampshire.

Five media students from the University of Creative Arts campus at Farnham in Surrey visited the Airfield on Friday 31 March to do some filming for their final year project. They had chosen to tell the story of Battle of Britain veteran and last surviving ace Tom Neil as the subject of their documentary.
They had previously visited Tom at his home in Norfolk to interview him. The team came to North Weald along with Tom’s son, Patrick, to film supporting material about his time spent here during those momentous days of 1940. Patrick says it was his favourite airfield.

To start their tour and so that they could gain an idea of the intensity of the fighting involving young men no older than themselves, we took them to see the memorial in Hampden Close for the nine teenage Essex Regiment soldiers who were killed by a direct hit on their air raid shelter in August 1940. We then visited St Andrew’s churchyard to view and film a selection of the war graves. Roughly one quarter of North Weald’s wartime fatalities occurred during the five months of the Battle of Britain.

The Gate Guardian represents Tom’s Hurricane V7313, and they filmed that along with Patrick holding a picture of his father and other members of 249 Squadron in front of his aircraft. They also went up to the Tower VCR, and stopped at several locations around the Airfield to view where the Battle of Britain movie was filmed. The Squadron hosted them for lunch, after which they filmed a further interview with Patrick Neil.

We were glad to be of assistance for their project, which features a great friend of the Airfield. It is good that young people are still inspired by such heroes of our past.

Wednesday 1 March

A nice low pass by the BBMF’s Mark IX Spitfire MK356 on its way to Biggin Hill for some TLC.

Saturday 18 February

I’m back in on Monday, so some Spitfire and Vamire action once again courtesy of my colleague James McDowall