This time I hooked up with my friend Steve who was up from London to visit the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm Museum, part of RNAS Yeovilton at Ilchester..

It has four exhibition halls with over ninety aircraft, more than two million records and 30 thousand artefacts making it Europe’s largest naval aviation museum.

The first British Concorde
The first British Concorde (Richard Harding)

The star exhibit of the show for me was the first British Concorde which made her maiden flight in 1969.

The last to fly in 2003 is now displayed up at Aerospace Bristol and I had seen her along with a prototype at Duxford in Cambridgeshire.

I also have a distant memory of seeing a Concorde fly past and hearing its sonic boom.

The cockpit of the Concorde
The cockpit of the Concorde (Richard Harding)
An information board about the Fastnet disaster
An information board about the Fastnet disaster (Richard Harding)

There were displays of the work of the Royal Navy Rescue helicopters including the Fastnet disaster of 1979 which resonated with me.

We were on a family holiday staying at the Holiday Inn at Plymouth where many of the relatives of the 15 competitors who lost their lives were also staying.

I remember seeing the battered yachts limping in to Plymouth Sound.

A Royal Navy
A Royal Navy (Richard Harding)

Other exhibits include the immersive Aircraft Carrier Experience and Barracuda Live: The Big Rebuild.

Not a single Barracuda aircraft still exists but one is being carefully reconstructed including parts gathered from wreck sites.