Careering Through Nature: Newark Air Museum

Showing posts with label Newark Air Museum. Show all posts

Saturday, 3 April 2021

Journey to Vulcan

A later start today but I still got out and walked for just over two hours.

It was an odd sort of walk really, for it was hardly a scenic or pleasurable route. The main purpose was actually to see how long it would take me to walk from work to my vaccination appointment on Tuesday. Gee the glamour of the outdoor life.

However, it wasn't all tarmac and traffic fumes, although it was mostly that. I saw a massive hare on the showground, a hare so big that I thought it was a deer when I first glimpsed its flashing white tail. Buzzards were circling in various places, and once the sun was out it was a reasonably pleasant day.

I also saw the big Vulcan bomber at the air museum, although I couldn't get as close as I thought. It's a historic aircraft that arrived at the museum by actually landing on the runway next door, part of the old RAF Winthorpe site.

I remember seeing a Vulcan Scramble at an air show at RAF Waddington. Those aircraft were BEASTS!

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 03.04.21

Sunday, 17 April 2016

The Other Kind of Gannet

As part of BBC Nottingham's "Big Day Out" today, a lot of museums and attractions in the county were offering free entry today; with Newark Air Museum on my doorstep on a decent spring day, it was a no brainer to head out there.

Certainly a lot of people had the same idea as me; the place was packed with families getting stuck into bite size scotch eggs and bags of Haribo on the picnic tables while the serious aviation geeks queued up to be photographed in various open cockpits, struggling to get into the tight spaces because of tem billion pounds of photographic guff hanging round their necks.

I just wandered around, lining up shots of the big planes, and with also an eye out for any wildlife amidst the masses of cold war jets that form the bulk of the museum's collection. I was rewarded with a pied wagtail sitting atop the cockpit of a Canberra bomber, and a pair of mating peacock butterflies in the gravelled auto-jumble car park.

My favourite aircraft in the collection is the hysterically misnamed Fairey Gannet AEW early warning aircraft. Neither fairy like in its lightweight delicacy, nor gannet like in its sleek swiftness, this particular Gannet is a maritime patrol aircraft with all the aerodynamic qualities of a concrete piano. Laden down with a radar dome like a pregnancy of octuplets, how it reached the end of its carrier take off run without plummeting straight into the sea is beyond me.

With a top speed of 250mph, it was painfully slow even by pre-war standards, let alone the jet era it flew in. But it must have been successful as it had an operational career of 35 years and was exported to several countries. I think that's why I liked it.

Like me, it has a fat belly and lumbering speed, and still managed to succeed despite its disadvantages. OK, maybe not that last bit. For me.

Yet.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 17.04.16

Sunday, 11 October 2015

Vulcan XH558 Drops By

She seemed like an ideal test subject for my DA-DA-DAAAAAA brand new Fuji S8650!

OK, it's the last one in the shop, a display model, but it works, and as soon as I'd rescued the SSD card from the compact camera I had dropped, I headed off for Newark Air Museum to take some thrilling shots of the mighty Vulcan V-Bomber on her last flight.

As she normally does, she honoured the museum with several circuits and a dramatic roll and climb, the engines roaring. And as I stood next to the main road, I found immediately how tricky it actually is to take photographs of a moving aircraft with a 36X bridge camera. The focus tends to struggle to keep up!

The extreme shakiness of the photographer doesn't help either!

(looking now at some online reviews, it appears that the focus is renowned for being a little slow on zoom shots, but the camera in general gets a good write up.)

Anyway, here are the best shots I could get of the Vulcan.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 11.10.15

Monday, 13 April 2015

I am an Accidental Tough Mudder

I planned a more adventurous, more interesting sort of run today, but I had no idea how much of a hack it would turn out to be.

I wanted to run past the huge Knowhow buildings, over the A17 and along a country path to Newark Air Museum. But I've run the route before, and the section along the A17 is a bit bloody frightening, to put it mildly.

So I thought I would be devious. I've noticed the flyover across the road before, and figured that if I ran round the back of Knowhow, I would be able to then find a farm track would lead to the bridge and get me over the road safely.

What actually happened was that I got stuck in dense urban jungle twice! One was stumbling along through foot high nettles on a steep embankment next to the A1. The second one was some kind of hell of thorns and grabby, nasty twigs that cut my hand, and covered me in green lichen spores like I was undergoing the transformation the astronaut suffered in "The Quatermass Experiment."

Luckily I didn't turn in a ravenous octopus plant that planned to take over the planet. It just took me 40 minutes to move two kilometres, and by the time I finished, I found myself in a world of ploughed fields dotted with piles or tired, rope swings over dirty ditches and fifteen foot walls with ropes attached.

I was lost on the Airfield Madness course!

I didn't do the obstacles. I'm too weak and useless. Instead I ran around looking for the bridge, missed it, and ended up running half a mile along the A17 anyway before crossing the road UNDER the bridge, and running past more obstacles past the Air Museum, before heading for Coddington, and then home. In the end I did 9 miles, saw only a kestrel in the wildlife sense, and was covered in plant debris.

There should have been someone at home to give me a certificate.

Si