Chocks away at Duxford

Today we were at Duxford air museum, which is part of the Imperial War Museum in Cambridgeshire. Last year we bought my dad a trip in a Tiger Moth biplane with Classic Wings. Today was his time to fly.

This was just after he landed after his half hour flight. He really enjoyed it and we were lucky with the weather. Just after this it started to rain and I am not sure they did any more trips. He was able to buy a video of the flight recorded from a camera just above his head. They do charge a fair bit for that, but it is a nice reminder of the experience. The plane may be a similar age to him as he was born just before the war. It still seems to be flying well.

I had not been to Duxford for a long time even though it is not too far from us. It was a wartime airfield and is still used by various small planes that were lined up there as well as these flight experiences.

They have a row of passenger planes by the airfield. Unfortunately they were all closed to the public today.

This little one did thousands of flights between some of the Channel Islands. Each flight was less than twenty miles, but would have been much quicker than a boat.

There are a series of hangars with various planes and other exhibits. My parents were not up for the long walks between them, so we just went around the one near the entrance.

This Handley Page Victor was built to drop nuclear weapons. They have the larger Vulcan next door and you can stand right under its bomb bay.

Next door is a space filled with various planes. This was taken after I had just been in the Comet which was one of the first jet airliners. It is a pretty plane, but they had some crashes due to stress fractures.

You would not want to be standing here when Concorde fired up its massive engines. I am sure this one was outside on my last visit. It was used for testing and is full of various equipment and masses of cables rather than seats. I never flew on Concorde, but I experienced the noise of them flying into London's Heathrow Airport and I saw several fly there for the final time when they ceased operations. One did crash in France, but that was due to debris from the runway rather than a fault. They were really too expensive to be viable.

This is part of a plane flown by senior Nazi Rudolph Hess who wanted to attempt to make peace with some British leaders in 1941. He ended up as the only prisoner in Spandau Prison until he hanged himself in 1987.

You could easily spend all day at the museum and I will probably return. The engineering aspects of planes fascinate me. Some people will be into the war stuff, but there is much more than that here.