Yorkshire Air Museum

We were up in Yorkshire this week house-sitting for my youngest step-daughter while she is in Canada - lucky girl - and had a chance to go the Yorkshire Air Museum at Elvington. It is an excellent museum to visit, very accessible for all ages and mobilities, with a small shop and café, and lots of exhibits. I am not an aeroplane buff, but I enjoyed it very much, while my eldest step-daughter, who was with us and loves aircraft, thought it was excellent.

I was not very good keeping tabs on which plane was which in my photographs, so apologies for the information gaps. My favourite was the Victor bomber/tanker, but my lovely wife found that very scary, she much preferred the early aircraft suspended in the hangar. I can thoroughly recommend the museum. It has various buildings with exhibits in on a range of topics, as well as the static aircraft displays. They have a website so go there for more information.

Elvington was a WW2 RAF heavy bomber base, which eventually had two Free French heavy bomber squadrons flying from it. The runway is still there to see - all 10,000 feet of it.

Hurricane Nightfighter.

There were several Buccaneer aircraft at the museum.

This was quite a big aircraft, apparently an enlarged version for nuclear bomb delivery.

My favourite, the Victor bomber/tanker.

This shows the control tower - they are trying to renovate this building - along with many of the other WW2 buildings.

I was pleased to see this as one of my uncles - who was a draughtsman at Martin Baker's - had a role in its development.

There were several replica early flying machines suspended from the roof in the main hangar.

A drone - but an early form, nothing much like they seem to be now in the Ukraine.

A Halifax heavy bomber as used by the squadrons based at Elvington.

One of the buildings had displays all about air gunners from both World Wars which I found very interesting.

My youngest sister used to work for the NAAFI, but not from one of these! She had a proper shop, canteen and bar to run at RAF Marham about ten years ago.

The Shackleton is a work in progress.

And this was sitting in the car park.

I noticed from my blog statistics that the blog on Didcot Steam Museum is already one of my most popular. Perhaps I should switch to trains and planes instead of wargames!