Morgan and Jane's EXCELLENT Adventure: PLANES! Duxford Imperial War Museum (Ashwell) 1 November

The Blackbird. Almost as cool as our Corolla. Almost.

Anyone who is not interested in planes should probably skip this post.

On our back to London we stopped off at Ashwell for a couple of days to sort out the van, and to see the Duxford Imperial War Museum. It is based at an old aerodrome, which had been an RAF base from the First World War through to 1961. Most of the exhibitions are based in the original World War Two hangers. It is still a working aerodrome and they have several air shows a year.

Inside the main hanger, they really stuff the planes in there. That is an Avro Vulcan bomber in the background.

Jane piloting a helicopter - kind of.

The Concorde. The nose 'droops' down on approach to landing so the pilots can see where they are going.

Not much room. The hull expands by a foot when flying leaving a gap in the inner hull above the flight engineer. Apparently it was a jolly jape to stuff his hat in there, thus trapping it when the plane cools down and the hull contracts again.

Very, very cramped - I'm kneeling on the floor. If I was sitting on the chair there would only be a couple of inches between the top of my head and the overhead locker.

An Avro Vulcan - the UK's nuclear deterrent until they started putting nuclear missiles in submarines.

Nuclear bombs go here.

One of these is a deadly attacker of the skies, and the other is a plane.

The 'Conservation in Action' hanger had the museum's current restoration projects on display, and you can watch the workers in action. It is incredible, and gives a sense of the huge scale and complexity of the projects. I also loved the 'Flying Aircraft' in the Hanger 2. While the museum itself does not have any flying planes (due to the cost and complexity), this hanger houses the privately owned planes which ARE in flying condition. The museum staff services and restores them, and the planes are often used for filming. We recognised a couple from various movies including "Memphis Belle".

A B-17 in for restoration.

The wings.

These are the privately owned flying planes. We could have bought shares in a flying boat at 17,000 Euro a share. Maybe for Christmas.

No plane builder's cleavage thankfully.

On the other side this plane is the Memphis Belle (from the movie)

There were two stars of the show for me:

The Concorde - the fastest passenger plane ever with a top speed of over mach 2 (2,170 kmh), it set the speed record for a civil plane in 1974 which still stands. The Boeing we flew to the UK on has a maximum cruising speed of a bit over 900kmh. It only made any profit for the airlines operating them because the French and UK governments wrote off ALL the development costs. It's also a good thing it only took 3.5kms to cross fly from London to New York - it is very, very cramped inside.

The SR71 Blackbird - this is a reconnaissance plane that was designed to fly faster and higher than any missile. It still holds the records for fastest and highest continual level flight (also set in the 70's).

Favourite amazing facts:
- The heat of flying at over Mach 3.3 (3,500+kmh) and at over 80,000 feet meant the plane expanded (like the Concorde). So when it was sitting on the runway, cold, nothing 'fitted' properly and it would leak fuel.
- The pilots had to wear pressure suits to deal with the heat and atmospheric pressure. These became the space suits they used on the space shuttle. On landing, the canopy was over 300 degrees celsius.
- It is mainly constructed out of titanium, which they had to get from the Soviet Union - quite an impressive feat in the middle of the cold war.