It's good news. I had the pleasure of visiting St.Mawgan a couple of weeks ago and I was very happy to renew my acquaintance with a much-loved airfield. It was a bitter-sweet experience to be standing in front of the huge hangar again, now that so much of the airfield has changed, but it still has the same atmosphere that it always had. It was nice to see the Canberra T4 being re-assembled outside - who would ever thought that a Canberra would ever be parked there again?!
I have to wonder what is going to happen if they keep acquiring aircraft. The ghastly fence across the huge apron doesn't leave much space, and with a VC10 inside there it'll be almost full. If they ever manage to get the Nimrod transported down there, it'll be pretty packed!
But good luck to them. I get the feeling that visitor numbers are never going to be great but I guess the visitors are secondary to their main activities so maybe it's not important that huge numbers ever visit. It's certainly a remarkable turn-around for a site that looked doomed to decay and eventual demolition... and it couldn't happen to a better place!
So Bruntingthorpe and St.Mawgan get a VC10 but the RAF Museum doesn't get one now, because the VC10 is apparently no longer capable of safely achieving a fairly unremarkable short landing for which it was designed. What a truly shabby business. I wonder how RAFM will explain this latest absurdity. I suppose it's a mixed blessing that the RAF doesn't have any more aircraft of such proportions, other than the Tristar, as it would seem that (based on past experience) the RAFM only regards aircraft as being worth preserving if they're sufficiently small enough to warrant the attention and expense. Absurdity hardly seems an adequate description...
Last edited by WH904; 21st Aug 2013 at 23:09.