Blacksheep.
I respect your opinion on airshows but I can't agree with it.
Airshows now are no where near as exciting as they used to be.
Apart from the actual flying that I don't think is as good we also hardly have any RAF Airshows, we don't even have an offical RAF Battle of Britain airshow in England anymore, its a sad state of affairs.
Apart from the RAF Stations that used to hold airshows ( not just BoB ones ) in the 60s 70s and 80s we also had the American bases having airshows like Upper Heyford, Weathersfield, Alconbury and even Mildenhall, these airshows are all now gone.
There is no choise now as there are hardly any military airshows in England anymore.
I have a paper somewhere saying that 55 RAF Stations are open today for the Battle of Britain, now zero.
As to airshows not being as exciting as they used to be, I don't think todays shows come anywhere near the old ones.
Today we have 9 Hawks as the RAF Display team, yes they are good but they are 9 trainers, in the 60s we had 9 Lightnings, and teams with 5 Sea Vixens, 22 Black Hunters looping the loop, scrambles of Vulcans etc, even back in the 80s there was a scramble of VC-10s at the last ever Brize Norton airshow and a scramble of 8 F-111s at Upper Heyford, today you would be lucky to get 1 F-16 and 1 Tornado at an airshow and in between them you will get a couple of girls standing on a wing and some bloke with geese flying beside him, hardly show stopping numbers.
We need to have the Vulcan flying again and be allowed to have Lightnings flying in this country again and aircraft like the Shackleton to remind us how good airshows used to be.
Peter.