The airbase in the news in recent days for the fact it has been targeted by a foreign force and possibly the first time a facility of the kind has been since WW2. Needless to say the suspects are out on bail, as the justice system is back-logged, the prisons full; and we too busy arresting grandmothers at fossil-fuel protests.
It is all because the airfield ~ built in readiness for the D-Day landings ~ is one of a pair in Europe that can facilitate the gamut of US military power in the shape of the bombers B-1, B-2, B-52 (how does that work?) and spy-plane U2.
When I solo'ed there on June 27th of 1978 there was nobody resident except this, our humble University Air Squadron... put there for a summer camp instead of Brize Norton where we stayed, presumably because we could do less damage.
Meanwhile whilst the archives are open, on January 6th of the same year I first took to the skies in an aircraft ~ XX543 ~ that I'd see displayed at the Southport airshow practically forty years later, it having been taken into private ownership.
I mailed them at East Midlands where it was based to ask if they'd consider going for a spin?
'No' they said, as we're a bit like that in the UK and it's their train-set after all.
Squadron Leader Ron Lloyd, unbeknown to us had flown practically everything there was to fly and did so in the film 'The Battle of Britain'. Teaching me must have been a low-point in an otherwise dazzling career though when I last heard, still alive at eighty he was flying somewhere in Oxfordshire.
