Sidmouth Airshow 2021

[DD_Arthur]

Or more acurately;  Sidmouth Airshow and Super-Spreader event, Friday 27th. August, 2021.

 

 

It's a very British thing. Take a small seaside town with poor access and an uncomfortable beach and cram several thousand people onto it on a rising tide, under lowering skies!

It's good for the bars and fast food joints local economy and we always like to give a warm welcome to our summer visitors....

 

 

Anyway,  first off was a display by the Royal Navy Wildcat.  Now being a bit dense and knowing next to nothing about modern aircraft I assumed it would be one of these  

 

 

Unfortunately it turned out to be one of these...

 

 

It went up, it went down, it went sideways and sometimes it looked like it might fall out of the sky but I don't have much patience for choppers at the best of times so we'll move onto the next performer which was a Pitts Special of some sort and i thought it put in a pretty good display.

 

 

It was capable of some astonishing prop-hanging

 

 

 

 

As time wore on the tide started to rise....

 

 

...and it was time for a pair of Spitfires from the BoB display flight

 

 

 

In previous years the display line has effectively been the shoreline, so it all took place overhead.  In these post-Shoreham aircrash times the rules for UK airshows have changed.

The display line is now a line of marker buoys about 200 metres off shore.  The Spitfire, being a little plane, suffers from these sort of restrictions. They're simply too far away and you don't get nearly enough of that Merlin noise either!

The tide?  Yeah, it kept coming in!

 

 

At last it was Red Arrows time.  How did we know?  The man on the Public Address system wound himself into an unintelligible frenzy and handed over to 'Red One' who was leading the 'Arrows.

Judging by his radio calls he seemed to be flying a fast jet whilst also wrestling with a bear in the cockpit!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by DD_Arthur

[DD_Arthur]

 

 

 

Always a most impressive display and always good fun cycling back up through town amongst the angry, impatient motorists trying to leave and the hoards of pedestrians walking in the road, jeering at the motorists.....

[Bremspropeller]

Great fotos, Arthur!

[Hoots]

Fab photos Arthur, I’ve got a mate who lives in Sidmouth, sounds like a trip down to laugh at the holiday makers might be an idea

[Lusekofte]

If I ever saw a flying Spitfire. I never done that live. Great photos 

[HappyHaddock]

Whilst  various factors have changed the nature of our local RNLI  fund raiser (For those international folk that don't know, the UK's main coastal rescue service is not a tax funded coast-guard but a volunteer run charity) I used to get to watch an amazing air display out of my bedroom window each year.

 

Just three snaps attached; all taken without having to leave my front door

 

 

[DD_Arthur]

Luuurvly?.

Where is this HH?

[HappyHaddock]

NW England - end of the Wirral peninsula overlooking the Irish sea.

 

Even though we tend not to get such impressive air displays any more, we still seem to be on the flight paths to and from various other North of England airshows at different times of the year.

 

I won't quite say it's got to the point that hearing the roar overhead of a merlin engine is so ordinary I've stopped looking up, but....

 

At various points I've looked up from my garden  and spotted spitfires, hurricanes, and the lancaster from the battle of Britain memorial flight, as well as Airbus' large freight planes at low altitude coming in to land not far away, which is again the sort of oddity others go to airshows to see

 

That said when I lived in Lincolnshire among the WWII airbases of bomber command there was a while when I used to routinely get to watch the red arrows rehearse and practice on a daily basis, and back then friends of ours ended up working on the movie memphis belle.

 

Real shame my aviation interests are WWI focused as the above treats are possibly wasted on me... not that there are so many Sopwith camels buzzing about any more

[Chief_Mouser]

On 8/30/2021 at 11:20 PM, LuseKofte said:

If I ever saw a flying Spitfire. I never done that live. Great photos 

 

You need to come to Flying Legends some time. Hopefully it will still be as good since its move from Duxford to Sywell.

A lot of military stuff tucked underground around here (Corsham) so we do get the odd Spit turn up and display every now and then though. We used to be on the BBMF's route to the one of the south coast airshows but haven't seen them lately.

Saw the Red Arrows pretty much weekly in the 60s; they used to practice at Manston (when they had Folland Gnats) and gave everyone for miles around a free display.