Elvington 2000….another airshow I can’t really remember much about but I’ll bang the photos up even though they are terrible! Seems I got to watch a display from 2 x Mirage F1s, bet that was awesome but I cannot bloody remember any of it!
Also there was a Hurricane in a fetching night fighter black. Not sure I saw one again until this year when the BBMF painted one of their Hurricanes in a similar fashion.
We also had a Jag in the flying display. Jags were common as muck when I was a lad. They’d come blasting over the N York Moors, always in pairs. Now I’ll probably never see one flying again – can’t imagine India bringing one to RIAT!
Canberra WK163 was there in its all over silver finish. Next time I saw this machine was also at Elvington but this time in the black undersides/grey topside scheme. Beautiful aeroplane and very photogenic.
I went into the museum whilst I was there to see the Halifax. I remember getting mega excited when I read a copy of Bomber Command News (whatever happened to that??) which had an article about this ‘restoration’. I’m working from memory now but if I recall correctly the 4 x working Hercules engines came from the French Air Force (Noratlas??) the fuselage had been recovered from the Orkneys after serving as a chicken coop and the wings were from a Hasting?
Anyway, it was the only Halifax you could see in a museum apart from the one down at Hendon which is great but I wish they’d gone one way or the other with it. The restored front turret looks completely out of place when compared to the rest of the wreck which has been left as is apart from application of some product which prevented further deterioration. Of course, if I were to post this opinion on an aviation forum I’d be told in no uncertain terms that my opinion was wrong and I am disqualified from having an opinion on this airframe unless I owned it.