Several thousand people are assembled at the Heritage Motor Centre in Warwickshire, England, here to see one of the last flying displays of a Cold War bomber brought back to unlikely life. Even at a fair distance away – aircraft like the Vulcan aren’t allowed to fly directly over crowds at public displays for safety reasons – its size is staggering.
Avro Vulcan XH558, to give this aircraft its proper title, is the very last of the 136 Vulcans built still able to take to the air; most of its compatriots ended up going to the scrapyard. Vulcans entered service as nuclear-armed bombers in the 1950s, an atomic deterrent on duty every hour of every day. They were retired in the 1980s after performing their only ‘wartime’ mission on epic flights into the South Atlantic during the Falklands conflict. The Vulcan was at the very edge of aviation technology of the time, and all the more impressive considering it was built when Britain’s post-war economy still was having to deal with the massive cost of rebuilding Great Britain.
Vulcan XH558, operated by the Vulcan to the Sky Trust, is only flying at all thanks to a decade-long quest by a team of volunteers and RAF-trained engineers. Returning one of these four-engined bombers to the skies was one of the most complex aircraft preservation projects undertaken anywhere in the world.
He first heard about XH558 when it was brought by the Walton family in 1994, who intended it to be the centrepiece of a British historic aircraft collection; a woman in a charity he worked for suggested he go and see it.
The team were helped by one logistical masterstroke by the Waltons when they had originally bought the Vulcan in the early 1990s – they had also bought the RAF’s entire stock of Vulcan spare parts.