Autumn Air Show, Duxford 14th October 2007

As is the custom, the 2007 season draws to an end with the Duxford Autumn Air Show, the final bash before the long winter months.

After a bit of a grey start to the day, the low cloud broke into pleasant autumn sunshine. This years show held much of the usual, but there were a few nice surprises thrown in for good measure.

The show started with The Fighter Collection's naval types the Bearcat, Hellcat and the Wildcat, followed by a lovely formation flown by Golden Apple's F-86A Sabre with the RNHF Seahawk, and a solo display from Radial Revelations T-28 Fennec.

The now familiar Spitfire tailchase took on a different angle for this show with the lead aircraft being Tom Blair's recently aquired Buchon acting as a Luftwaffe Bf.109. The hapless Messerschmitt flown by ARCo's John Romain was being hunted down by three Spitfires in a rather one sided chase which included the Spitfire PR.XIX of the BBMF flying in a rare appearence with non-BBMF types.

Other more modern items on the display list were the RAF Tucano, and the return of the Fleet Air Arm's "Black Cats" display team with their Lynx helicopters. Ironically the last show of the season finally saw a second aircraft painted in the very attractive Black Cat scheme, so hopefully next years season will see both perfoming in full display markings. The Black Cat's put on their usual highly polished performance which always brings something a little different to the proceedings.

Also included in this year's display was the Miller DH Dragon Rapide. Marked up in wartime Scottish Airways colours, this aeroplane is a real beauty so it's always nice to see it appear on the display schedule. This was followed by a very nice display by Historic Aircraft Collection's recently restored Hawker Nimrod and Hawker Hurricane which flew some nice formation flypasts followed by a solo performance.

Sadly B-17G Sally B was grounded due a failure of the No.1 engine which will subsequently need to be replaced, so her engineering team took advantage of the weather and we saw her wingtips removed ready for entry into the hangar for winter maintainance. With the "big friend" stuck on the ground, Alister Kay flew OFMC's P-51D "Ferocious Frankie" as a solo performance, with his first low pass being of Ray Hanna proportions!

With it's debut in the 2006 Autumn Air Show, the Belgian Air Force F-16AM made a welcome return to Duxford, and flew a stunning display using it's wingtip mounted "smokewinders" after which it flew a number of formation passes with HFL's Spitfire XVIII, and TFC's TF-51D, definately not something that is seen everyday!

The Red Bull Matators were in attendance to finish the show, along with Paul Bonhomme who has done very well in this years Red Bull Air Races. The two powerful Sukhoi 26's put on a very polished performance and it was great to see them bring the Duxford show season to an end in style.

So that finishes our coverage of the 2007 season, thanks for reading and we look forward to next years shows!

We would like to thank Tracey, Pippa and the rest marketing team at Duxford, as well as Steve Eley for their support for the UK Warbirds web site during the 2007 Duxford shows.

Click the images below for a larger image.

Thanks as always to the marketing team at Duxford for their assistance.

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