The Next Air Tour??

[Melo965]

I was looking at the Two-Seat Spitfire Page today (on facebook) and found a good candidate for our next Air Tour event.

They are staging a 90th Anniversary nine flight Spitfire Circumnavigation of the UK with a 2 Seat Spitfire repainted to match the livery of K5054 the prototype Spitfire. Coincidentally today is the anniversary of the first flight of K5054 on March 5th 1936.

During the nine flights the K5054 Spitfire will be escorted briefly by other more modern RAF and/or British aircraft, commemorating each decade of aviation advancement since the first flight of K5054. This would give us a fun opportunity to have a story about the escorting aircraft too.

I am itching to be back flying a Spitfire for one of our Air Tours, naturally!

More infornmation about the commemorative flights can be found here:

Celebrating the 90th Anniversary of the First Spitfire Flight

We're planning a circumnavigation of mainland UK in a Spitfire painted in the original colours of the prototype K5054, in partnership with the RAF.

www.spitfires.com

They are also having a Charity Auction for each back seat Spitfire flight, one for each of the nine legs. If all the aircraft in my FSX/MSFS 2020 hangers were real, I could sell half of them and afford to put in an Auction Bid for a flight.

Here is what the K5054 repaint of BS410 looks like:


And here is a graphic showing the proposed route around the UK:


We could fly our Air Tour at a similar time to the April Spitfire flights, or plan our Air Tour for May so we have the accurate details about when and where the flights actually happened. And which aircraft were the escorts on each leg.

Let me know what you think!

 

[jgf]

Interesting route, looks promising; reminds me of this "race" from a few years earlier (except this was done at a blistering pace of around 45kt, lol).

 

[Tako_Kichi]

Many years ago, when I was beta testing Rick Piper's FSX BAe Hawk I hand flew it around the entire coastline of the UK (England, Wales and Scotland) once just because I could! I was actually recreating a flight I'd seen on a TV documentary about the British coastline where they mounted a camera to a real Hawk and flew it around the coast. The kicker was that for the documentary they mounted the camera on the rear of the fuselage facing backwards so that the lens didn't get covered in bugs/dirt etc. Once the flight was complete they took the video tape (it might have been before digital cameras back then) and played it sped up and in reverse for the show so that it looked like you were flying normally at high speed around the coast. It was a fascinating flight that really showed the huge variety of landscapes that make up the UK coastline. If I am not mistaken I think they did it on Mid-Summer's Day to have the maximum amount of daylight available between dawn and dusk.

 

[bosspecops]

Oh yes, that Round Britain flight in the Hawk was a 'Must Watch, show for many people in the UK. It went past a few places where I'd lived too, which was good.

I like the idea of re-doing the flight the 1911 flight too, and I have the Just Flight photo-real scenery package. It's for FSX, but I think they did it first for FS9. Maybe we could extend it further north into Scotland and further west into Wales for some REALLY serious scenery?

How about having EGDF as one of the checkpoints on the route Melo? We could share the scenery pack for everyone in the Club, eh?

 

[jgf]

flew it around the entire coastline of the UK

I did that a year or so ago in a Cierva, tooling along at 1200ft, 95kt, "discovered" a lot of scenery I didn't know I had.