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Duxford


Panzer Vor!!!

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It was fabulous.

When we eventually sat down it was near to the tank bank,

and we had a great view of the flying. Lots of places selling

kits though I didn't buy anything as nothing appealed. Prices

weren't too bad and Kit Krazy were selling 1/3rd off all marked

prices.

Food concession stands however, were charging up six quid for

a simple burger and up three for tea & coffee. We went to the

Duxford café and had a very nice meal for only six quid each.

Flying and hangar displays were well up to expectations with

lots of friendly staff to help the bewildered who can't tell a

Mustang from a Tiger Moth. The revamped American building

is now a little more crowded but well worth a look around.

The tank bank is, as ever, very well done and impressive.

The Victor in the huge paintshop looked somehow surreal in

that light, almost like a computer simulation.

The noise of an F22 doing a handbrake turn with full reheat

on was incredible and took me back to flying displays of old.

Lucky Britmodeller wallyinOz is there again today.

Will I go next year? Oh, more than likely. (And take sarnies!)

Edit; The commentator on the loudspeakers had a French accent.

A Brit would have been easier to understand (and it wasn't just me who had

problems understanding him)

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Bernard is an old friend of The Fightet Collection and has commentated for years. His accent isn't too bad, I don't think, and he has a more poetic sort of view on the aviation world which is a bit less annoying and dry than English accents reeling off facts and figures.

Anyway, Saturday wasn't that great, but what I suspected may have been post-Shoreham jitters may have just been a slightly low cloud base as the Sunday display was excellent despite a strong wind keeping many of the slower, lighter types on the ground.

Pete Kinsey was back on form with the Bearcat. Richard Grace's new Hawker Fury was very well flown. Fred Akary as usual did an incredibly precise fully aerobatic display in his Mustang and Raimund & Eric of the Flying Bulls did some superb formation aerobatics with the P38 and Corsair. Even Stu Goldspink got some energetic flying done in the Griffon Spitfire at the start which is often a nice, but sedate, tailchase affair.

Lastly, Sunday's Joker slot was flown by Nick Gray in the Spitfire V, something I've never seen before in all my time at Flying Legends and I've never seen a Spitfire flown hard since Ray Hanna passed away. Great stuff.

It was made all the better by getting parked in my pickup truck with the campervans on the front row just before the tank museum, which allowed us to set up our seats in the load bay. Normally we go to the Friends of The Fighter Collection whom we like to support, but I have to admit that the view we had would only be bettered standing on top of the control tower!

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Was the flying display distance the same as the May show ?

Guy

Edited by F4u
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Hi Guy,

I wasn't at the May show, but this year's display lines were indistinguishable from any previous year I've been, which more or less goes back to 97.

The changes to the crowdline by putting the barrier in front of the airliners and pulling it back to the south edge of the tank museum building looked to add more viewing area. They just straightened the crowd line out, but there were still 2 corridors of aircraft going east to west doing passes and rolls close to the crowd line and others going west to east and going vertical further back but still within the airfield boundaries for some of the time. The base heights didn't appear to be hurt much either.

The only thing I noticed to have changed was more spacing between displays and take-offs and landings than, say 6 years ago (but I noticed changes from 2012 onwards after the near-miss between Belgian Skyraider and landing Spitfire in 2011 - it's on Youtube on "Skyraiderdream" channel), and that some pilots avoided crossing the M11 at over 90deg angle of bank or on the way in or out of vertical manouvers - but the European pilots didn't change their styles at all to be honest. Their aerobatic manouvers that crossed the M11 were in the climb for rolling manouvers, and decents from vertical manouvers were sorted out well before crossing the M11 with shallow dives continued to bottom out passing the control tower about 1/3 the way down the runway well past the road.

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