A soft, grey haze hangs low over a wide, grassy field near the village of Duxford. Tiny flowers in yellow and white dot the green here and there. Not far away, perhaps a quarter mile, past a row of parked airplanes, a young man is climbing into a Spitfire fighter. A hundred and eighty miles away, 400,000 of his countrymen are trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk, and on this gentle Spring morning, he is going to help them if he can.
I don’t know when I first heard of the Duxford Air Show. It’s been on my bucket list with letters picked out in gold for as long as I have had a bucket list, simply because I love airplanes. More specifically, I love vintage warbirds, particularly the British ones, and Duxford is their home airfield.
The Imperial War Museum at Duxford doesn’t simply put airplanes on static display (though there are plenty of those here).
They put them in the air, where they belong. I mean, sure, the taxidermist did a pretty good job of making that lion seem lifelike, but wouldn’t you rather watch him playing on the savannah with the other members of his pride? The first plane I noticed in the museum hangar was a DeHavilland Tiger Moth hanging from the ceiling, but outside? Outside, there were nine of them (NINE!) flying in the air show.
The good people at Duxford really know how to put on a show, and they do it three times a year. The vendors’ area was uncrowded and well-staffed, and the food was well above par, even in the general admission part of the grounds. Even so, we heartily recommend the “Gold Experience,” which includes an excellent lunch served in a tent on the flight line, well-placed seating, and a bank of restroom facilities that they advertise as “luxury,” but which I would describe as “spotless and entirely without waiting lines.” That alone made it worth the £111.95 price of Gold Experience admission. IWM staff dressed in gold ties were beyond helpful, explaining the layout of the field and the high points of the show when we arrived, and making sure we knew to delay our lunch so we could take advantage of the flight line walk before it closed an hour before showtime.
The airplanes themselves harken back to when aircraft design was more art than science, and even the most lethal purpose didn’t preclude a nod to form and beauty. Lines were curved and bare metal polished. These are museum pieces, immaculately kept, each one a labor of love for dozens of people.
What’s more, they are beyond rare. The PBY and the Corsair are the only ones flying in Britain. The B-17 is the only one still flying in Europe. There are only fourteen flying-condition P-47 Thunderbolts in the world. Each one represents the pinnacle of technology for its day.
If they were difficult and temperamental back then, they can be downright cantankerous now. It took at least half an hour to get all four of the B-17’s engines running, her number four belching a fireball before it got going.
That’s where the skill of the IWM’s organizers really shines. The show is designed to allow for recalcitrant eighty-year-old machines without coming off the rails. There were plenty of modern aerobatic displays in the lineup, each with reliable engines and flown by pilots with attention-grabbing skill, and their purpose there was to keep up the momentum while the real stars got over their mechanical-diva selves.
The show opened with a solo display by “Nellie,” the only P-47 flying outside the US, her aerobatics set to Michael Kamen’s “Band of Brothers Suite Two.” It was a meaningful placement in the lineup and a moving tribute to the Americans who flew them into combat from Duxford from ’43-’45. I’m not too proud to admit that it brought tears to my eyes. This was, after all, Memorial Day weekend for us Yanks.
Getting to Duxford from London is remarkably easy. The Great Northern departs for Cambridge from King’s Cross St. Pancras Station, and the Greater Anglia will get you there from London Liverpool Street. Both London stations are served by several Tube lines. We chose to take Greater Anglia and spent under £34 round trip total. On airshow days, the IWM offers a free shuttle service from Cambridge Station to the airfield, a 20-minute ride on modern double-decker buses. Alternatively, the drive up the M11 to Duxford by car will take less than 90 minutes, but be aware that parking at the airfield itself requires a pass you print yourself in advance. (It’s free, you just have to remember to do it.) Traffic wasn’t bad coming in or going out, though I suspect that the September show marking the anniversary of the Battle of Britain will be quite different. Go early; the museums and displays open at 8:30 on show days, giving you plenty of time to see them before the airshow starts at 13:00. By the way, this is family friendly entertainment. There’s a play area for the kids, a paper airplane competition, and in the Airspace Museum, at least, there are hands-on interactive exhibits geared for younger audiences.
The highlight of the day came last in the airshow lineup: A Spitfire Mk I. Aside from movies and television, I’d never seen a Spitfire fly before. This particular early-model Mk I, from the IWM’s collection there at Duxford, is one of three flyable in the world and one of only eight in existence. She was delivered to the Royal Air Force’s 19 Squadron at Duxford in April 1940 and flew against the Germans over Dunkirk, where a bullet in her radiator forced her pilot to ditch her on the beach near Calais, which is where she stayed until 1985. Her young pilot did indeed help his countrymen stranded on that beach, when he downed a Ju-87 Stuka dive bomber trying to prevent their escape.
The date was 26 May 1940. Seventy-eight years to the day before we saw her fly in the Duxford Air Festival.
They have a tradition at Duxford of letting Spitfires perform in silence. So there, from our vantage point on the grass, we watched Spitfire N3200 roar-whistle through eleven minutes of aerobatics, her turns more graceful and her passes lower by far than all the others, and for one perfect moment, it was the Spring of 1940 again.
Do machines feel joy? This one sure seemed to and it was contagious.
We’ll be back in September.
Fascinating! My dad was a top turret gunner in a B-24 and my uncle was a B-17 pilot. Both were POW’s during WWII.
Wow, Jo Ann! When I was growing up, I knew men who flew in WWII, too. My next door neighbor had been a POW. They rarely talked about it, and it’s easy to forget what they did–which is why places like Duxford are so important.
Wow! That was an awesome read!! Thanks for sharing!!
Thanks, Tammy!
What a wonderful experience! Thanks for taking us through it as if we were there along with you, Kurt!