I'm drawn to air shows. This is partly because I've retained a socially backward child's preoccupation with makes, models and distinctive dorsal fin modifications. It's also because the spectacle of pink, porky, menopausal men nearly bursting through the seams of flying jackets and peak caps that wouldn't quite fit diddy Tom Cruise makes me realise I'm no longer the squarest kid in the playground. Then again, I have considered acquiring big shades and an emblazoned flight-suit and loitering possessively in front of a parked fighter jet when its owner has sloped off for an ice-cream. I’ve even practised my Colgate smile. Ladies, it’s not all about size when you’ve got 30,000 lbs of static thrust and six hard points to offer, woof woof. And I can get my hands on nylons and chewing gum.
Wheeling my delusions back into the hangar, there is real spectacle to be relished. The endless wonder of hefty, jagged hunks of metal defying then taunting the laws of physics. Skill, sinew, ingenuity, metal and fossil fuel artfully drawn together into spectacles of soaring splendour. The growl of ancient, piston-engined warriors evoking the terrors and triumphs of the war that formed our world. The raucous, sky-scouring thunder of fast jets barely tolerating human control. Yet in my third decade of aerial gawking, I'm coming to the view that air shows are most of all a barometer - of technology, of our place in the world, of military muscle, of how much we're defined by our past.
When I first donned my anorak and took to the flight-line in the early 80s, during the heady and paranoid final act of the Cold War, it was claimed that the US Air Force had more aircraft in East Anglia than the Royal Air Force had anywhere. This pleased me far more than it did the women living in ditches at Greenham Common – my single-minded enthusiasm for anything loud with wings far eclipsed my grasp of current affairs. Like the rest of my pimply brethren in the local squadron of the Air Training Corps, I was mystified and amused by the squadron of feminist peaceniks who descended on us outside a Remembrance Day service in central Manchester, begging us not to place our innocent young lives in thrall to an American imperialist Armageddon (I’m paraphrasing, clearly).
The big air shows of those days didn’t disappoint, flaunting all of NATO’s expensive military might. Cold-war dinosaurs were still alive and thrashing with ear-bleeding vigour. Small-talk was pointless when Lightnings and Phantoms were overhead, but the mile or so they needed to turn around did afford some respite. The tarmac actually trembled when a Vulcan got airborne at full chat. The B52 challenged the notion that a couple of acres of rattling sheet metal held together by rivets, spit and hope shouldn’t zip through the sky at 600 knots. The SR71 had clearly escaped from some vault under the desert where vat-grown geniuses designed matt-black titanium demons that outpaced rifle bullets, skimmed space and leaked corrosive fluid when their skin temperature fell below three figures.
Then there was the new breed. The novel F16 and F18 still gave the crowd plenty of speed and noise, but this time with impossibly tight turning circles, improbable angles of attack, and fluttering fans of water vapour as the air itself was pummelled into submission by the computers that now controlled it all with some artistic direction from the pilots.
Not that the party ended when the Berlin Wall came down, at least not straight away. Instead, the artist formerly known as the USSR was pleased to show off the majestic machines – like the colossal but nimble Su-27 - that had months earlier been the subject of code-names, espionage, speculation and techno-thrillers.
I was moved to write this cryptic piece by the air show I attended at RAF Waddington a few weeks ago. I’m fighting with a churlish impulse to call the whole thing a disappointing washout – but by the standards of the 80s, that’s what it was. There was skill, grace and wonder galore – from the unfailingly superb Red Arrows, the crazed Blades aerobatic team, the frankly impossible antics of the Chinook – but something was missing.
For a start, the Vulcan didn’t fly. The world’s only airworthy Vulcan bomber, a wonderful brute of a machine, a crowd-puller and the object of much ersatz patriotic nostalgia, is sustained mainly by frantic charitable lobbying. It failed to fly because of some bureaucratic snafu, causing those above the age of 50 to stage a mass huff, pack away their tartan rugs and clog the exit lane with Volvos and Hondas.
Then it transpired that only one performer, the RAF’s spanky new Typhoon fighter, had afterburners and supersonic potential – and that didn’t appear until 5 o’clock, precisely the time the canny motorist wants to be on the open road to beat the jam. There were Tornados, Harriers, F16s, F15s et al on static display, but these monsters shouldn’t really be static at all. Why weren’t they in their element, splitting the sky open with howling fury? Can it really be the case that even the Americans can no longer afford to actively display their wares?
The Typhoon is impressive enough. Also known as the Eurofighter, it was intended to be the next generation Cold War air superiority fighter. It gets off the ground in a heartbeat and is as advanced and as manoeuvrable as you could wish, assuming you want to take on a Soviet air armada, circa 1988. Unfortunately, it was delivered about 20 years late and at staggering cost.
It’s not that the leaking, creaking Tornado fleet isn’t in need of replacement; it’s just hard to see how the over-specified Typhoon provides value for money in these complex times, particularly when the USA could provide something as good off the shelf. The RAF finds itself deploying these high-tech Cold War warriors in Lincolnshire when what our armed forces seem to need most is a way of moving around Helmand Province without being blown to smithereens by enthusiastic amateur bomb-makers.
So while the geek in me bemoans the lack of exciting kit at air shows, the changes to the schedule over the last three decades is instructive. Circa 1994, it was just about possible to see the beginnings of a Peace Dividend and a safer world in which East Anglia no longer needed to accommodate wartime levels of US personnel. If the dull fare at Waddington this year simply reflected a safer and sweeter world than we had in 1989, that would be something even a plane spotter could celebrate.
Alas, the world is no safer, just a bit more complex. Our armed forces have more responsibilities and less kit and money to fulfil them. When squaddies die on mined roads for lack of helicopters, over-worked Nimrods explode because ancient design faults went unresolved, and a Hercules can be downed by a bullet for want of Vietnam-era safety foam, it’s really no wonder that the RAF can’t lay on much of an air show and show me where my tax pounds are going – unless of course, you count the Typhoon at a unit cost of £84 million.
