My apologies if you think I am questioning your level of respect; I am not. However, history records that the only aircraft recalled to the Argentinian northern mainland to protect against Vulcan attacks were Mirage III's - and that was purely because of their unsustainable heavy losses against British forces. Argentine air forces in the Falklands War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
XH558 on Twitter: "Expected route times given 13:00 departure. This will be updated as XH558 makes her way. http://t.co/WiDPYSP9mS" northern route, bit late sorry, southern route Sunday
Hopefully it will be on course west of Royston and on to Buntingford, planning to get out and wave farewell tomorrow as I couldn't get up to see it at Shuttleworth last Sunday. Fingers crossed this time.
I saw it at Dartmouth a little while ago, just before I came back "down south". Awesome and sad both at the same time - something I will never get to see again... Great shame that it can't include the Falklands as part of its farewell tour, but that might be pushing it a little bit...
I was in Dartmouth that day The Vulcan was great but the Typhoon the following day was amazing :Wideyed:
I can see Typhoons almost every day - the damn things take off right outside my window all the time when I'm at work...
But do they do a full display routine ? Watching the display with lots of tight high alpha / high g turns going into and out of afterburner, plus the noise, was very impressive.
When I first joined the RAF as a 17 year old I was based at RAF Leeming. We used to have the Vulcans there when they deployed. They were very spectacular when they launched, one after the other, and flew off in different directions. Many years later I left RAF ST Athan in my car as the last Vulcan was doing the "farewell" flight around all of the RAF stations left. By the time I had driven to RAF Wyton it passed over there so I got to see it twice. Not only has the number and type of aircraft been decimated by the UK government (Harrier, Jaguar, Vulcan, Nimrod etc) the number of airfields has also reduced drastically. It is hard to stomach for us older (late '50s) veterans, but I suppose that the UK cannot afford these things any more when MPs need the money for their expense accounts.
I've been a supporter of the Vulcan to the Sky team for a long time now but today they dissapointed a lot of people. The flight plan for the leg of the southern tour around Bristol was supposed to go from Bristol Airport across the 2 Severn bridges then loop back around to Filton then cross the river to Cardiff. Instead they diverted from the airport to Clifton downs for a photo op, went straight to Filton then over to Cardiff, missing out the 2000 odd people lining the banks of the Severn. After their twitter feed was hit by people complaining they did make a brief appearance at the old bridge, by no means the spectacle promised and only after a lot of disappointed people had left. It was a real shame.
My room is just about level with the point on the runway where they hit afterburner and go into a vertical, ballistic, 30,000 feet climb - very noisey and pretty damn impressive...
Interestingly, the total bill for the armed forces' presence in the Falklands is about 1% of the UK's defence budget. Which is almost exactly the same as the total cost for MP's pay... I know which one I think represents better value for money...
They may not be great - but these are the last two photographs I will ever get to take of a flying Vulcan... :-(
I took one final shot at Staverton today with this. I have plenty of digital shots of it and used to shoot it on 35mm film when I was a kid at air shows. I wanted to try and capture it one final time on film and had a frame left from some work I've been doing this weekend. One chance, I just hope it comes out when I develop it tomorrow. The boy is just posing by the way, I had already taken the shot. Couldn't trust him to push it when the aircraft was in the right position.
Luckily I saw it today too. Despite being in Sussex and therefore not really that far into the route it was 18 minutes earlier than the Facebook post publicising the times said it would be. It was also about a mile too far north of the publicised turning point (luckily so was I!!!). As it came over the trees (where we obviously weren't expecting it) it looked fantastic! To see it "out in the wilds" was much different to seeing it at an airshow, as I had at Airbourne earlier this year. I was surprised how low it was, must be so cool flying that all over the country at that height. It's a shame to think it won't be flying after this year as kids need to be taught about this kind of thing. I was talking to a family there who had a boy of (I guess) around 10 years old and his Dad and I were explaining how the Vulcan flew to the Falklands to drop bombs to prove a point to the Argentinians. It takes things like this to bring up the subjects.
