Fantastic it was to see a Lightning streak across the airfield, go into a vertical climb and end his show by disappearing into the 10,000ft cloudbase while his afterburners still pulverised our senses. But my most memorable air show was as a 10-year-old, the Battle of Britain day at Binbrook where my father was stationed in 1949.
As well as normal activity from the station’s Lincolns, the week would be enlivened by a pair of Tiger Moths practising their ‘instructor and pupil’ routine, Dad said the pupil was often the better pilot as he bounced the TM from wheel to wheel if not wingtip. It was said that one ‘pupil’ had flown through a hangar which had been emptied beforehand but this could have been an RAF myth.
The Training Command slots would continue with a noisy Harvard and the quiet chuff of Cheetah radials in Oxford and Anson. Our excitement mounted as visitors arrived on the Friday, Spitfire 22 with its huge five-bladed prop, Mosquito with crew wriggling down through an impossibly small door in the side, Dakota like the one which gave me my first flight from Karachi to Bombay.
Saturday saw the arrival of three Auster Autocrats for joy-riding, at 10s 6d (52p) well beyond my pocket money reserves which had been depleted by purchases of balsa and cement for modelling pending the purchase of my own aircraft in the future. In fact it took 20 years which seemed like a millenium at the time but merely a few months today …
A big feature was the descent of a Horsa glider, released from a Dakota overhead the field. It seemed to approach at 45 degrees, so slowly that I could have hit it with my catapult. I still remember the Horsa every time I see a Jumbo, huge flaps and slats extended, descending so slowly that one wonders how it can stay in the air at all.
But the highlight was the arrival of a USAF Superfortress which parked on the grass east of the tower. Closer in was a line of 12 Lincolns demonstrating an operational takeoff, which my father told me to watch closely as I would never see another one (he was correct in this, as usual). The Lincolns started up in groups of three, groundcrew hauling the trolley-accs from one to the next as an AC2 climbed up on the mainwheels to close the starter contacts inside the engine nacelle.
Alas the show was stolen by the B29, as its huge DoubleCyclone radials barked into life with clouds of blue smoke that screened part of the airfield until they warmed up. One by one, the Lincolns waddled round the peri track as their ancestral Lancasters had done only a few years before. Each rolled down the runway as they were given their green light, but all eyes were on the silver monster which took off a few minutes later.
All very tame by today’s standards, but I wish I could see and hear it all again. Maybe I still can ... or maybe it’s this darned tinnitus.