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When I visited the de Havilland Aircraft Museum, I filmed this cutaway Merlin Mk 25 being turned over.

It is the remains of the starboard engine from Mosquito night fighter HJ719, built at Hatfield in 1943. The engine was badly damaged when it arrived at the museum, so it was turned into a cutaway display.

Each cylinder had two spark plugs. One magneto fired one plug in every cylinder, while the second magneto fired the other. This helped the fuel-air mixture burn more effectively and meant that the engine could continue running, although with reduced performance, if one ignition system failed.

I spent ten years in the RAF working on Phantom and Victor engines, so my experience is mainly with jet engines. It was fascinating to see a piston engine opened up and watch the pistons and valve gear moving.

For anyone who has worked on Merlins or similar piston aero engines, what other details should people look for in this video?

Came across this church today at Whaplode Drove and had to stop for a look.

The building felt quite unusual compared with many Lincolnshire churches I’ve seen. The brickwork, arched windows and especially the covered bell tower really caught my eye.

I’m guessing it’s more of a small belfry or cupola rather than a full stone tower, but it gives the church a very distinctive look.

I couldn’t go inside today, but the churchyard had a calm feel to it.

Does anyone local know more about the history of this church or why the bell tower is designed like that?

The aircraft that I am standing next to is the SR-71A 61-7962. Fifty years ago today, on 28 July 1976, it set a world altitude record. I was privileged to be in the company of and listening to the people who flew and supported the Blackbird programme, standing underneath the aircraft.

When I was in the RAF, whether it was the Canberra or the English Electric Lightning, I had heard people talking about 85,000 ft, but on Saturday I was standing underneath the actual aircraft that broke a world record and it made the number mean a lot more.

What was interesting when I was listening to the people flying and working on the machine was that they saw it as just a normal part of their day. The mission to them was just something that they did. They did not see it as anything special, although what they achieved was quite frankly amazing.

Listening to the various talks, these guys were flying at around Mach 3.2 as part of operating the aircraft. For two days in July 1976, some of those capabilities were turned into official record attempts.

In 1976 it was the US Bicentennial year, and a decision was made to attempt three major SR-71 records. Eldon Joersz later explained that these were the 1,000 km closed-course record, sustained-altitude record and absolute-speed record. This is what they achieved:

Altitude in sustained horizontal flight
85,068.997 ft
Robert Helt / Larry Elliott

Speed over a 1,000 km closed circuit
approximately 2,092 mph
Maj Adolphus Bledsoe Jr / Maj John Fuller

Absolute speed over a straight 25 km course
2,193.64 mph
Capt Eldon Joersz / Maj George Morgan Jr

The Duxford aircraft, 61-7962, was the aircraft that set the sustained horizontal-flight altitude record.

The aircraft flew at an altitude of 85,069 ft. What makes that impressive is that the sustained horizontal-flight record still stands 50 years later. IWM continues to identify the Duxford aircraft as the SR-71 that set the 1976 sustained-altitude record.

Just to put that into perspective, this was not a brief zoom climb where the aircraft traded speed for altitude.

The record was for sustained horizontal flight, meaning the SR-71 was maintaining that altitude rather than momentarily reaching it at the top of a climb.

What impressed me was that the SR-71 programme was trying things that had never been done before and solving problems.

One of the speakers made a point that stayed with me. Although the SR-71 is no longer flying, what the programme achieved should still be an inspiration to us all. It showed that things that seemed impossible could be done.

She got a round of applause for that comment, and I later thanked her for saying it.

Has anyone here seen 61-7962 when it was operational, or come across any first-hand accounts from the crews involved in the July 1976 record flights?

I made this as a one-off thank-you gift for Chris Johnson, the Chief Engineer at an English Electric Lightning restoration project.

I knew Chris many years ago from Air Training Corps days, and we later crossed paths again in the RAF when I was an instructor at RAF Halton. After losing touch for years, we recently reconnected through aviation.

When I visited the Lightning restoration team, Chris showed me around the aircraft and how to power up the cockpit. The whole visit brought back a lot of RAF memories, and I wanted to make something personal to say thank you.

I’m not a designer, so I used AI to help me work through the first dial concept. The idea was to make the dial feel more like a cockpit instrument than just a watch with an aircraft picture on it.

The design was inspired by the Lightning cockpit: panel shapes, a 0–30–60–90 instrument arc, warning-strip detail and a small aircraft silhouette.

The AI gave me the starting point, but it wasn’t production-ready. A designer had to tidy the SVG because some elements didn’t line up properly.

After that, I printed around 10 test dials on the UV printer to work out which elements needed to be overprinted multiple times. Some parts looked fine on screen but disappeared at actual watch size. Other parts needed more depth, more contrast or cleaner edges once the hands and glass were fitted.

This is the first version assembled on the wrist.

What I learnt is that AI can help someone like me get an idea moving, but the real test is still the physical print. The machine, the layers, the dial size and the final assembly all show you what actually works.

I’d be interested in honest feedback from watch people. Does the dial feel cockpit-inspired, or would you simplify it further?

During a recent visit to the de Havilland Aircraft Museum, Ron, one of the museum’s volunteers and restoration team, showed me around the collection.

One exhibit that stayed with me was the green, full-size replica of the DH.88 Comet Racer G-ACSR, which I photographed during the visit.

Its clean, streamlined shape immediately caught my attention. Then I discovered the scale of the engineering challenge behind it.

De Havilland had only around nine months to design, build and prepare a completely new aircraft for the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race from England to Australia.

The first DH.88 did not fly until 8 September, just six weeks before the race began on 20 October. That left very little time for flight testing, correcting faults and preparing three new aircraft for an approximately 11,300-mile journey from RAF Mildenhall to Melbourne.

Nine months may sound like a reasonable amount of time until you have worked in manufacturing.

I began my manufacturing career in the 1990s, and manufacturing remains part of my work today. We used multidisciplinary teams involving design, production, purchasing, quality and people from the shop floor.

The specialist machines we produced were probably far less complicated than an aircraft, yet it could still take around nine months to reach a fully functioning and dependable result.

Our company was moving towards BS 5750 and applying TQM principles, with documented procedures, design reviews and quality controls.

De Havilland did not have CAD, digital simulation or modern project-management systems. But it was not starting from nothing either.

The company already understood lightweight wooden aircraft construction and produced its own engines and propellers. It had experienced designers, skilled craftspeople and control over much of the complete technical package.

Perhaps the real achievement was not inventing every element from scratch but bringing proven knowledge together quickly around one clear objective and an immovable deadline.

Twenty aircraft started the race. The red DH.88 G-ACSS Grosvenor House completed the course in 70 hours and 54 minutes and won. The original green G-ACSR finished fourth, while Black Magic retired after suffering engine trouble.

From my manufacturing perspective, designing, building, testing and preparing three new aircraft within nine months may have been every bit as remarkable as winning the race.

What do you think mattered most: the clear objective, the integrated team, the existing knowledge they could reuse, or a willingness to accept more risk than a modern programme could?

The nine-month development period, first-flight date, race distance, aircraft results and technical features are supported,

I recently visited the de Havilland Aircraft Museum and had the opportunity to walk through its surviving Air France Comet 1A fuselage.

I’m ex-RAF and worked on Phantoms and Victors, so I tend to look at aircraft from an engineering and maintenance point of view. Before the visit, I mainly associated the Comet with the fatal accidents that ended Britain’s early lead in commercial jet aviation.

Seeing the aircraft made me realise that its story is much bigger than that.

The Comet entered passenger service in 1952 as the world’s first commercial jet airliner. It proved that passengers could travel faster and higher than they could in the piston-engined airliners of the period.

Walking through the cabin, what struck me was how compact it feels today. Yet in the early 1950s it must have appeared incredibly futuristic.

The most thought-provoking exhibit for me was a section from the full-scale Comet water-tank fatigue test at Farnborough, with the origin of the failure marked.

The familiar explanation is that the early Comets failed because they had “square windows”, but that is an oversimplification.

The wider problem involved repeated pressurisation, metal fatigue and stress concentrations around structural openings, fastener holes and manufacturing details. These were operating conditions the industry had very little previous experience of.

After the fatal break-ups in 1954, investigators recovered and reconstructed wreckage and repeatedly pressurised a complete Comet fuselage inside a water tank until it failed.

The human cost must never be forgotten, but the investigation transformed the understanding of fatigue in pressurised aircraft.

Later versions, including the Comet 4, returned to successful service, and the basic design eventually led to the RAF’s Nimrod maritime-patrol aircraft of which I had the opportunity of flying in,

So how should the Comet be remembered?

As an aircraft that failed because its designers moved too far ahead of existing knowledge?

Or as the pioneering aircraft that revealed problems every later jet airliner benefited from understanding?

Photos from my visit to the de Havilland Aircraft Museum.

 

I saw this display at Museum Zaanse Tijd near Amsterdam.

Pocket watches are suspended above a figure of Father Time, with much larger clocks visible behind them. The words “Tempus Fugit”, or “Time Flies”, appear above the display.

What struck me was that the pocket watch didn’t simply make a clock smaller.

It changed time from something fixed to a church tower, public building or piece of furniture into something an individual could carry.

But that only became possible when several developments came together: spring-driven power, smaller gear trains, improved escapements, better balance mechanisms and increasingly precise metalworking.

Which development do you think was the real turning point?

Was it the mainspring that made time portable, better regulation that made watches useful, or the ability to manufacture all those tiny parts accurately?

I recently visited the de Havilland Aircraft Museum and photographed its Swiss Air Force Vampire FB.6, J-1008.

I’m ex-RAF and worked on Phantoms and Victors, but the Vampire was an aircraft I knew relatively little about.

What surprised me was discovering that its central fuselage pod was constructed from wood.

After the visit, I did some more research and learnt that the later Venom was developed from the Vampire and retained a similar wooden fuselage-pod concept, despite all-metal aircraft already being well established.

From a manufacturing point of view, that made me think. If a structure is proven, understood and still doing its job, why redesign it simply because a newer material is available?

De Havilland instead concentrated much of the development effort on areas such as the more powerful Ghost engine, thinner wings and improved aerodynamics.

The volunteer who showed me around was Ron Richard, a carpenter who had also been involved with the museum’s restoration work. I previously worked in woodworking myself, so de Havilland’s use of wood as an engineered aircraft material was especially interesting.

Switzerland continued operating both the Vampire and later Venom for many years, which also suggests that the underlying design had considerable durability.

For those who know these aircraft better than I do, was retaining the wooden fuselage pod mainly about weight, proven engineering and manufacturing efficiency, or were there other important reasons?

Photos from my visit to the de Havilland Aircraft Museum.

I spotted this on the way to Lincoln and had to have a closer look.

Being ex-RAF, anything aviation-related in the landscape tends to catch my eye, but this one really stood out.

It’s called On Freedom’s Wings, a full-size steel Lancaster bomber sculpture beside the A46 at Norton Disney.

At first it reminded me a little of the Angel of the North. Not because it looks the same, but because it has that same roadside landmark feeling. You’re driving along and suddenly this huge shape appears in the sky.

Then I found out the RAF Swinderby connection.

The sculpture represents a Lancaster heading home to RAF Swinderby, which stopped me for a moment because I did my basic training there.

Access seems to be limited and only open on selected days, which explains why there wasn’t anywhere obvious to stop properly when I passed.

For me it connected Bomber County, remembrance, RAF history and a place that was part of my own RAF journey.

Has anyone else seen it from the A46 yet, or been there on one of the open days?

I got the chance to sit in an English Electric Lightning cockpit today.

You don’t really just step into a Lightning. You climb in carefully, onto the seat, right foot down, then left.

Chris Johnson, the Chief Engineer, showed me how to switch the power on, and the cockpit came to life.

As ex-RAF ground crew, that was a special moment.

The aircraft itself was being lined up to be taken out as part of restoration work around the No.2 engine starting sequence. The tail wasn’t quite straight, so the tow bar was disconnected, the arm was moved manually, and the team pushed the aircraft by hand to get it lined up.

I helped push it, which brought back some great memories of doing similar things around Phantoms during my RAF days.

I also met several ex-RAF people who had worked on Lightnings. The amount of knowledge still around the aircraft was impressive: starter systems, radar, avionics, cockpit displays and all the practical details that don’t always come across when you just look at an aircraft from the outside.

What struck me most was that this is not just about preserving an airframe.

It is about preserving the knowledge of the people who actually worked on them.

I visited the de Havilland Aircraft Museum because I’ve been trying to learn more about RAF and Cold War aircraft beyond just reading facts online.

I’m ex-RAF and worked on Phantoms and Victors, but the Mosquito was something I wanted to understand better from an engineering and historical point of view.

Seeing three Mosquitos together was what really stood out.

The prototype, the later bomber variant, and the armed version all seemed to tell a different part of the story.

A few things I noticed:

• the wooden construction was not a gimmick, it was part of the whole performance idea
• later variants had more powerful Merlins and broader paddle-style propeller blades
• the bomber version could carry the 4,000 lb “Cookie”
• the armed version felt very different when you see the guns and cannon up close
• I also spotted 29 Squadron on the Mosquito squadron board, which surprised me as I worked on Phantoms with 29 Squadron years later

For those who know the Mosquito better than I do, what do you think was the biggest reason it worked so well across so many roles: speed, wooden construction, Merlin engines, or the adaptable airframe?

Photos from my visit to the de Havilland Aircraft Museum.

This was a lifetime bucket list moment for me.

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I was lucky enough to see the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight on a regular basis when I was stationed at RAF Coningsby many years ago. Seeing Spitfires around the station stayed with me.

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Some 40 years later, I finally got the chance to fly in one from Biggin Hill.

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First photo is me with the aircraft before the flight, second is in the cockpit, and the third was taken from the spotter aircraft by my wife while we were airborne.

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One of those experiences that is hard to put into words.

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Just caught this in the evening sky

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I think it’s the crescent Moon with Venus nearby.

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Simple photo, but it made me stop and look up for a few minutes.

Old photo from a 29 Sqn detachment to Norway, around 1981/82 from memory.

I am kneeling at the bottom, sixth from the right, although you may still need a magnifying glass to spot me.

One thing that really stood out from that trip was seeing a pair of F-16s take off together. One of them went up, pulled a loop, and caught up with the other one. It looked incredibly agile and almost elegant.

I also remember sitting in the F-16, and the cockpit felt completely different to the Phantom.

The Phantom cockpit felt very much of its generation — lots of dials, switches and a proper old-school Cold War feel.

The F-16 felt more modern straight away. The side-stick was on the right, the seat was reclined, the visibility was excellent, and the whole layout felt cleaner and more pilot-focused.

That matched what I saw outside as well.

The F-16 looked agile and modern.

The Phantom felt heavier and more deliberate, but very robust and capable.

Looking back, it was a great contrast: the F-16 looked like the future, while the Phantom still had that heavy Cold War presence.

Happy days.

Old photo of me with some of the ground crew on a Phantom FGR.2.

I worked on the Phantom during my RAF days, and it always felt like a proper Cold War aircraft to me. Big, loud, serious, and built for readiness.

I remember loading Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles on exercise as part of the ground crew. Even though it was an exercise, it gave you a real sense of what the aircraft was there for.

The gun pod also looked like a serious bit of kit.

I also remember being in Cyprus where crews were practising live firing. Those sorts of exercises made the whole aircraft feel very real, not just impressive on paper.

Looking back, I think the Phantom had real presence. It was not a delicate aircraft. It looked like it had a job to do.

Looking back, I think the Phantom had real presence. It was not a delicate aircraft. It looked like it had a job to do.

Happy days.

My wife and I spent the morning making this homemade thali for friends who came over for dinner today.

On the thali we've got shrikhand, puri, chapattis, daal, aloo matar, saag paneer, pakoras and rice.

Poppadoms and chutney were served separately.

We live in a fairly rural part of the UK and the nearest place serving a proper thali is around 55 miles away, so over the years we've got into the habit of making our own.

I was mainly the assistant chef, although I took my role as chief taster very seriously.

My wife deserves most of the credit.

What's the first thing you'd reach for on the plate?