One of the neat things about my job is that I get to travel regularly and often that travel takes me to places with great aviation-themed museums…as a result I can get up close and personal with some aircraft that here, I could only ever enjoy vicariously from afar…

This is the ‘Great White Hope’ of the British aircraft industry in the mid-60s…in never got a name other than the TSR.2…only one ever flew and only two survive in the world after the Communist British Government decided that manned aircraft had little future in modern combat…whether all the new technologies incorporated into the TSR.2 would have come to fruition and it would have been the much-lamented Mosquito of the Cold War is debatable (and that debate still rages!) but it is very cool that museums such as the RAF Museum at Cosford let you get as close as this to such an icon.

Still on a Cold War kick, the Vulcan bomber was one of the three ‘V’ bombers developed in the wake of WW2 and the early days of the (then) not-so Cold War that were technological and conceptual leaps ahead from the Lancasters and Lincolns that they replaced. The Vulcan was a massive delta wing that soldiered on until retirement in the 1980s – it was only in the twilight of its RAF service that it was ever employed in anger, being the mainstay of the Black Buck missions flown against the Argetine-occupied Falkland Islands in 1982. Very cool being able to get so close to the one in the Imperial War Musuem at Hendon that I could stand up in the bomb bay…even cooler that one last Vulcan, privately-operated, still flies in the UK air show circuit…

I was really happy to be able to get this close to a Vulcan here and at Cosford as I (VERY) slowly wrestle with the pig that is the Heritage Aviation Vulcan in 1/32…

And finally…close up and personal with an oddity like the C-125 Raider…designed as a short take-off and landing utility aircraft after WW2 in case that whole ricketty shakey helicopter thing didn’t pan out…this one is parked outside at the USAF Museum near Dayton, Ohio – hopefully it will be moved inside once the new annex is built…

So there’s my non-schmaltzy (possibly unless you’re a fellow plane-spotter) take on ‘close‘…hit the link to see some more…