fivemack | Eighty thousand people standing in a field

I've wanted to go to a properly spectacular airshow for ages, and this year was finally on the same continent as Fairford at the time of the RIAT.

I've been informed that the pictures in this post cause some friends pages to turn into great swamps of chaos, so I've concealed the rest of it behind a cut.

Looking at my payslips and the Public Spending Review, I think I've contributed £170 this year to Her Majesty's Ministry of Defence; nonetheless, I paid £30 more to see what my tax money had bought. There's a purely atavistic attraction to the roar of mighty engines, the pulse of heat as a twin-engined fighter leaps directly away from the crowd on reheat (I really hadn't expected the engines to glow that shade of Balrog orange), the cloud forming at the shock-waves behind the unaerodynamic wings of the Stealth Fighter, the heat-haze and astonishing, ear-shaking, car-alarm-firing blast of noise as a heavy bomber blasts afterburning down the runway.

Everything you could hope for at an airshow turned up: four Hercules flying in formation, all three kinds of current US fighters, both Stealth planes (the B2 flew a single pass and returned to Missouri, as is its wont), Tornados, Harriers, Jaguars, and a Frenchman M. Calamité (known to his friends as Jane) throwing his Mirage around the sky as if feeling the dictionary needed a new definition for panache.

The sky was blue, the sun shone, I ended up baked like a lobster. I came festooned with cameras (though as nothing compared to most of the people at the front of the crowd, nearly all wielding digital SLRs with lenses bigger than my thighs); the three films I shot with the 300mm lens are being developed and Photo-CD'd as I type, but until then ...

Red Arrows break
C130 refuelling a Pave Low helicopter
More Red Arrows

Met up with huskyteer and friends for lunch and the Red Arrows; I found her among the crowds partly by listening for the time-lag between the noise on her and my mobiles as the planes took off.