Memories of GMAG in the seventies! Happy Days!
Having seen this thread I just had to sign up and add my memories of the Greater Manchester Aviation Group - GMAG.
I was a spotter at MAN from 1973 to 1980 before moving on to a career in ATC and was a regular on the GMAG coach trips during the seventies; happy days!
Memories come flooding back about the trips ; I remember Graham Froggatt as a Real Gent and Phil Lines as a Rough Diamond!
Who will ever forget the experience of trips on Vales Coaches ; either boiling hot in summer or freezing cold in winter!
When you weren't getting slowly poisoned by exhaust fumes coming up from the underfloor panels you might find yourself rolling backwards down the sliproad of the motorway trying to jump start the coach back to life!
My favourite pasttime when returning home was sitting at the back watching your fellow spotters falling asleep and sliding sideways into the aisle then waking up and doing it all again a few minutes later!
Even better was 2 people sliding sideways in opposite rows and banging heads together!!
There was nothing better than a trip on "One Of Vales"!!
Who else remembers ;
Piling out of the coach at Luton at 4am to check out the biz jets?
In all my trips with GMAG I only ever saw Luton once in the daylight coming back from a trip to Brussels!
Visiting Reymerston Hall in Norfolk, home of Wing Commander Wallace who put on an impromptu demo of the Wallis Gyrocopter from his front lawn and getting a round of applause from 50 spotters after landing
We did several trips to Lasham and I am sure that on one trip a logbook was "liberated" from a Dan Air Comet after a walk inside the plane - we were left to wander around the field on our own unsupervised - 9/11 and the security clampdown was still so far away.
The excitement at approaching Mildenhall ( a great airshow ) and seeing a triple tail which meant my first EC121 Connie was in the bag!
I think back to my spotting days at MAN in the 70's thinking how varied the airliner types were in those days; I feel sorry for todays spotters as everything looks the same now!
Access to the piers was fantastic ;I regret not taking photos at the time!
I would happily stand there as Viscounts and 1-11s started up just feet away and I also crawled under the fence at the pub near the threshold to watch the 1-11s, 707s and VC10s taking off from mere feet away- I now have the tinnitis to prove it!
I spend my time these days searching out propliners and older classic jets in the USA - I have no interest in the modern airliner types - they are all so similar that I have difficulties telling them apart!
I would be interested in other GMAG members memories