RAF Waddington 2nd July 2011

Always very impressive the Vulcan shows its distinctive shape.

RAF Waddington is just outside Lincoln and in terms of personnel is one of the largest RAF bases. Their airshow is a long established tradition and attracts around 120,000 spectators each year. We particularly wanted to see the Vulcan as Julie had never seen this aircraft flying.

The show was due to start at 10:00am so we left home at 06:00 to arrive well in time. All went well with the drive up the A1 but within a few miles of the airfield there was a road accident up ahead and we were diverted. There was a long delay (we had some entertainment from the special 'Air Show' radio station but were a bit disappointed to arrive only minutes before the show actually started. At £52 for the two of us and £7 for a program it wasn't the cheapest day out but promised to be a special day.

The static display was perhaps a bit less impressive than we had hoped. There was a slightly strange mix of small civilian aircraft and some more exciting military hardware. Certainly not as many military ones as I had expected.

Tornado GR4

A couple of Tornado GR4's from Lossiemouth put on a great display ( and an extremely noisy one) of their role in places like Libya. I must say that this was the sort of thing that we had come to see and the two aircraft beating up the airfield along with ground explosions etc really increased the excitement level.

USAF Thunderbirds

The United States Airforce Thunderbirds don't appear in the UK very often and then usually at USAF bases. They last appeared at Waddington in the year 2000. Back in 1971 the Thunderbirds appeared in the UK at RAF Bentwater in F4 Phantoms, a truly impressive plane but these days they fly F16-C's. To be honest their display was a little spoilt for us by extremely long vocal introduction that seemed to drawl on for an age before the planes took to the sky. Their display was exciting but later when the Red Arrows gave their immaculate display I felt very proud of the UK team. It was perhaps rather unfortunate that the Blades team, who are based locally to us at Sywell, were on immediately after the Thunderbirds. Despite some fantastic precision flying and breath taking close passes their propeller powered planes were no match for the noise of the jets.

Team Viper is the only Hawker Hunter display team and put on a great, if perhaps rather long, display. The B17G or Sally B as it's know was up from her home at Duxford.

Overall we were glad that we had visited this big event but something seemed to be missing and Julie and I would have preferred to have seen a lot more fast, noisy and exciting jets. Even the Vulcan as great as it was didn't manage to set off any car alarms as it used to do.