Paul_Sengupta wrote:The airliners are there in addition to all that. It's not taking anything away.
If anything they add shed loads of interest :. During my ten years of stewarding I’ve met several ex Concorde pilots on Concorde , met the actual pilot of the Comet , met several ex hosties on the Britannia who with tears in their eyes recounted their trips all round the world with Monarch .
In addition I’ve had a lecture on the sleeve-valve Bristol Centaurus on the Ambassador By an engineer who worked on them and spoken to a person who had been a pax on the Trident which got shot up by invading Turkish forces in Nicosia. ( Bullet holes patched up ay BEA engineers and a/c flown back -patches still visible on both sides of fuselage ).
Also researched an article by an elderly female pax who wrote a contemporary account warts and all of a trip from Heathrow to Lagos in the Hermes ‘Horus’. Memorable quote: ‘I was very surprised by how pale the palms of the porters in Lagos were’.
Excerpts from this account are now used in the DAS British Airliner Collection brochure.
Final point often lost in the noise They are all British airliners representing all that was great in civil aviation before successive government let it all go to worms .
Not a Boeing or McDonnell Douglas in sight .
But the public clearly see Duxford as an aviation museum .
Res ipsa loquitur…
Not a lot of mileage, though, in trying to change entrenched views .
Peter