I started off my airshow season on a beautiful summer's day in London for the annual Trooping The Colour flypast. Unlike most years I had company with my lovely and long-suffering friend Hilary joining me to celebrate our passions for Chinooks & day drinking!
On the train
Arriving into London
After being distracted by the cute stationary shop in Victoria Station we headed down to The Mall to watch the flypast.
And to take the most epic selfie ever with the Chinooks!
Clearly the coolest people on The Mall
Hilary patiently endured the next 10 minutes of my autistic info-dumping of the aircraft that were flying over us.
The aforementioned Chinooks
Battle Of Britain Memorial Flight Dakota
Phenom & Texans
Voyager & Typhoons
Globemaster
A400M
Rivet Joint
Poseidon
Typhoons
Red Arrows & F35s
I like how the F35s are framed by the Red's smoke
After a pit stop at the Eros statue to eat our Tesco salad bowls (lunch of kings) we went across to the Design Museum for their Wes Anderson exhibition. We're both fans of his quirky but charming films and it was really cool to see props, costumes & his drawings.
We had a walk through the lovely Holland Park before heading to Camden.
There's a vampire-themed pizza restaurant in Camden called Lost Souls Pizza that I've been dying to try (pun fully intended) for ages now and it didn't disappoint!
It's decorated with loads of cool horror-movie posters and artwork.
Clearly my room needs this
I fit into the aesthetic very well
The pizzas were even black!
An accidental sub-theme of the day was my managing to match all my drinks to my eye-makeup
Our next stop was the decor polar-opposite of Lost Souls Mr Fogg's Botanical Tavern. There are loads of different Mr Fogg's locations across London (Vana and I went to the 'Antique Emporium last year) and it's my goal to visit all of them.
So pretty
Not quite so pretty 😅
It was another decor 180 when we went down to the next door Hidden Society cocktail bar which had cosy 'old library' vibes.
I feel low-lighting is far fairer on everyone around me
They had a crazy cocktail menu inspired by works of art which lead to Hilary having a tomato soup flavoured cocktail inspired by Andy Warhol's soup can paintings.
As the day drew to a close it was time to head home and leave London to it's beautiful sunset.
Thank you so much to Hilary for putting up with me for a whole day!
Now we're into the airshow season I have 2 in a row with Headcorn this weekend and Duxford's Summer Airshow next weekend. Naturally there will be aviation related spam, sorry content to follow.
My airshow season has started off 'good and proper' with another visit to London and my first full show of the year at Duxford.
Back in May I went up to London for the VE Day Flypast and a couple of weeks ago I was back (in sunnier weather) for this year's Trooping The Colour flypast.
When I arrived in London I jumped on the tube and was greeted by this excellent poster for one of my favourite musicians Yungblud (as an aside his new album is awesome and is currently my favourite album of the year so far).
I finally managed to visit the Petrie Museum - I've been wanting to go for so long but it's only open certain days of the week as it's part of the University Of London. It was well worth the wait! The museum is only small but is absolutely packed with Egyptian artifacts and is absolutely fascinating, in fact *whispers* I actually now prefer it to the British Museum 😨
The Goddess Isis
Naturally I went searching for Eos, I mean Anubis.
Found her!
Uncanny
What always staggers me is when museums have jewellery that is 1000s of years old but looks like it's just come from the high street!
Just mind blowing
This comb was adorable too
I could have spent all day at the museum but it was time to head to The Mall.
Hello A380
Blue skies over The Mall shocker!
The flypast was great fun as always -
Lancaster
A400M
Globemaster & F35s
Poseidon
Typhoons
Voyager & Typhoons
And of course The Red Arrows
You can watch the flypast on my YouTube channel -
I had some time before my train so I chilled in Green Park.
I made some friends
Post geeking smiles
The next weekend Corney and I went to our first full show of the year, Duxford's Summer Airshow.
They've had a move around in the AirSpace Hanger and the resident Lancaster has it's own space at the moment.
They've recently acquired a Sea Harrier -
Apache
Whilst I was walking along the flight line I saw these Apaches arrive -
The show was opened by the always excellent Team Raven who are now up to a 7 ship formation.
MK14 Spitfire
Duxford had a very special visitor this year the R4D 'Ready 4 Duty' a US Navy variant of the DC3 Dakota.
Another formation team displaying were The Starlings -
Helicopters were the big theme of the day including this Cobra which I'd never seen before.
Duxford was one of the few shows this year to feature the RAF Chinook Role Demo
They'd displayed at RIAT last year but I was too far back to see the entire display. Luckily I had an excellent vantage point in the members area. You can watch the display below -
One of my favourite acts of the day was the newly formed Army Air Corps Attack Helicopter Display Team comprising of a Wildcat and 2 Apaches.
Wildcat & Apache
It was so cool seeing the aircraft in action and seeing quite how intimidating an Apache looks head on!
You can watch the display here -
The show's finale was provided by a thunderous display from the RAF Typhoon now entering from crowd rear!
The team's callsign this year is 'REHEAT' and it certainly lived up to it's name ...
They even shared one of my photos on their Instagram 😍
Despite the wind putting paid to a couple of displays from the RAF Falcons and the BBMF it was a really great start to the 2025 season. Next up ...... RIAT!
