NetHeads, Biggin Hill "Air Fair" was this weekend. It's an old RAF Spitfire base that I was half expecting to be a quaint grass strip with a bunch of Spitfires on hand, but it turned out to be a thriving corporate jet kind of place with several runways instead. I guess I'm spoiled by Oshkosh and Sun N Fun, but the planes were kept well away from visitors, and if you think OSH is too "commercial", you have no idea how commercial it can get. I only saw a couple of experimental airplanes there, and they were basically Bleirot replicas on display for a cosmetic company.
One reason I went was to buy a few metric nuts and bolts from what I figured would be a few vendors of those kind of things, but no such luck. The only real airplane parts I saw was one vendor selling instruments from old military aircraft (what's a "power loss meter", anyway?). The majority of vendors were selling hamburgers, chips, and ice cream, and a huge proportion were inflatable kiddie attractions. It was a trifle disappointing. As for old warbirds, there were several, but the most notable were an ME-109, three Spitfires, a P-51, and a Vulcan bomber. I couldn't stand to stay around long enough to see the Vulcan, but I got to see it later, oddly enough. I was back at the farmhouse when I heard this roar approaching, and looked out just in time to see the Vulcan thundering overhead at maybe a thousand feet, headed from Biggin Hill (an hour and a half's drive away) to it's home base. What are the chances of me being directly under the flight path? There was also a worthwhile micro version of the Popham airfield antique car show, with a few more cars I'd never heard of before. Below are some links to the few flying photos that I took. http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/andover/090627238.jpg is an ME-109. http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/andover/090627268.jpg is the Spitfire that opened the show. Carolyn Grace did some aerobatics in it just to kick the "flying display" off. http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/andover/090627285.jpg http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/andover/090627300.jpg It's a beautiful airplane, and it was great to be able to stand there and see a Spitfire fly doing ten or twelve flybys intertwined with aerobatics, at one of the very fields where they flew from during WWII. That alone made it worth the visit. You can't escape the history of this place. There are former RAF fields just about everywhere. The book vendors were full of books detailing accounts of various war stories as told by the guys who'd been there and done that. I have a couple of books that Mac Wood gave me to read, and so far, they are quite spellbinding. For more on Carolyn Grace and her Spitfire, see http://www.ml407.co.uk/pages/ ... Mark Langford N56ML "at" hiwaay.net website at http://www.N56ML.com --------------------------------------------------------
