Re leather helmets and gloves, zetec - they go nicely with 55 year old airframes. In this country we p**s our defence budget away scrapping perfectly good kit and spending a fortune replacing it with something newer and not necessarily better. My old Mk1a helmet with a cloth inner was much more comfy than any of the later one-piece jobs from Mk II onwards, although it probably didnt look quite as "cool".
Re the Bear, I can think of a dozen or more types we introduced after the Soviets brought in the Tu95 which are now nothing but a distant memory, but the Russians are still getting sterling service out of them. There's a certain irony in scrambling Typhoons to deal with something that looks like it has come from a vintage air display - I bet the Russian crews love it!