Planes In The Rain

It's not just cars and girls at Goodwood, there's aviation porn, too!

This year there were seven Spitfires buzzing around during the day but unlike most years the only Mustang on show was parked on the ground with the Mustang dealership's sexy motors.

Pretty, huh?

Another visitor from the Colonies was the legendary Sally B, here on her first of hopefully many visits.

Star of course of the movie Memphis Belle …

… here's Sally in all her racy, cheesecake glory.

Do click on this one. The plane was way too big to get in one shot so I had to stitch this together from four separate photos in Photoshop.
I do like that polka dot dress with the black faux-fur wrap down in the bottom left corner.

Quick addendum: Bummer! It appears that Blogger now reduces the sizes of your photos so even clicking on this only brings it up a quarter the size of the image I posted. And selecting "View Image" doesn't help either. A pox on Blogger and their cheap ways!

When I was a kid, my favourite plane was the Supermarine S6B, the English racing seaplane that won the Schneider Trophy and broke the world air speed record in 1931.
Designed by R.J.Mitchell, it was a thing of beauty, only surpassed in sheer grace and power by his later design, the incomparable Spitfire itself.
This is one of only two survivors from the original six built. It's not in flying condition but perhaps one day we'll see it in the skies again.

Here's another spiffy Brit: the Fairey Swordfish, all neatly folded up for carrier duty. These little guys torpedoed the crap out of the German fleet in the long years of struggle before America realised there was a war going on.

I caught this Spitfire taking off into the evening sun as we were leaving the course. The weather had been too crappy to get any decent photos of their earlier flying displays, but there's always next year.

This is always the highlight of the weekend's flying. Goodwood is based at the old wartime RAF West Hampnett airbase and in honour of the base's heroic rôle in the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight graces us with its glorious presence each year. Usually there's a Spitfire and a Hurricane accompanying the Lancaster but this year we got a brace of Spitfires instead (and a swallow, which you can see trailing the Lanc if you click and blow the image up larger).

As the planes flew over, the air thrumming with the heartwarming roar of Merlin engines, the clouds started to break at last and the Memorial Flight caught the first rays of sunshine we'd seen all day.
Seeing (and hearing) these guys is always a lump in the throat moment for me.

Here's to next year.