Well worth a visit
 

On Sunday, just by chance that it happened to be Battle of Britain weekend, I visited the airfield museums at Parham and Martlesham Heath in Suffolk.

Based in the remaining Control Towers they offer an amazing collection of relics and memorabilia, with histories of the crews who flew, and so often lost their lives, during WWII.

Parham remains in the middle of open fields, but the tower at Martlesham Heath, surely one of the most historically interesting of UK airfields, is now in the middle of a housing estate.

Also, the knowledge of the "old boys" manning these museums is incredible and I felt privileged to discuss Douglas Bader, Mutt Summers, James Stewart and Glenn Miller with people who had met them.

Wonderful, even Mrs Southender was impressed.

Cheers

Southender

Another place worth a visit.

The Science Museum is running a Spitfire exhibition, they have taken Mk24 PK422 out of storage, removed the paint and dissembled it into major subassys. The wings are mounted on the wall and the fuselage, engine, oleos and tail in front of it.

I'd never realised that on that particular Mark, the rudder doen't extend to the bottom of the fin, its cut off horizontally about a foot above the bottom of the fuselage, which is extended rearwards to meet the trailing edge of the rudder.

On the other side of the gallery is a display of Spifire memorablia, from the people who designed her, built and flew them. There is also a very interesting analysis of British & German camera gun film, which displays trajectories & gunfire strikes.

I was impressed with the standard of archive footage, there was a lot I'd never seen before and it was considerably better than the usual films used on TV.

The Spitfire exhibition is on Floor 2, but if you run upstairs to the Flight gallery, you'll get to see an original 1940 Spitfire & Hurricane, both with combat history, the Gloster Whittle, Amy Johnson's Moth and Alcock & Browns Vickers Vimy.

And the rest of the Museum isn't bad either - I must back there.