And how old were those three aircraft which over flew the Royal wedding?
Old indeed
But what is not obvious is how much
money is required to keep them flying. You have to be a
millionaire (by that I mean having millions actually spare to play with) for each of those planes. The big one, even more.
Look at a Spitfire close up and you see the evidence of probably several man-hours of maintenance for every hour it flies. They have to be flown carefully and at low engine power to make them last. Nobody is going to do dogfights with them - well nobody in the UK. Americans can afford it
That is the real issue with old planes. You can buy them cheap (sometimes astonishingly cheap) but you then pile the money in every year, every service on which something is discovered. Not always of course; some are very well preserved, but in most cases.
And a prebuy check on something say 30 years old needs somebody well familiar with the actual type and somebody who is working for
you