RAF Fairford has been in the news recently.
I’m reminded of a personal anecdote involving RAF Fairford, and, seeing as I’ve just spent a couple of hours rebuilding an old website in order to find said story, I’m going to repeat it here for posterity.
Back in, oh, 1997, I went to the Fairford International Air Tatoo at RAF, um, Fairford in deepest Gloucestershire, with my friend, who I’m going to call Geoff, because that’s his name. We parked his Volvo (‘Harvey’) some way away from the show, and walked across a few fields to avoid the horrendous traffic queues along the Lechlade and Whelsford roads. It was a steamingly hot July day, and we had a great time. The B2 Spirit landed on English soil for the first time ever, at least publicly. There was lots of noise and smoke, a Tiger Meet, an F4 Phantom, and did I mention the noise and smell of burnt JP8? Towards the end of the day, waiting for the Red Arrows to appear, we wandered around the statics.
And here we found a B52, surrounded by a guard wire. The B52 is a large aeroplane, with eight engines and wide, flappy wings. Both wingtips have outrigger wheels to prevent the wingtips from slamming into the ground during taxiing, landing or take-off. The wings are that wide and flappy. Importantly, the wingtips protruded over the guard wire, and on one wing the outrigger wheel was a good couple of feet off the ground, on the public side of the fence.
The USAF guards/RAF snowdrops were a little way off, so I said to Geoff, “Watch this,” and reached up to the wingtip. I grabbed hold of it, and pulled it down. Then I pushed it, and pulled it down again. On the next push up the entire wing had started to flap, like it was the wing of some giant predatory bird. At this point, Geoff grabbed my shoulder, said “Stop that!” in a somewhat startled and frightened voice, and started walking briskly away.
“Like I’m going to break it?” I wondered, but followed him at a half trot. When I caught up we slowed a bit: First rule of doing something slightly risky is ‘never run way; it only draws attention’.
And that is how I started terrorizing the USAF.
Postscript. I was checking my memory of the date, and came across this website. Interestingly, the author went both days (Geoff and I only managed the Saturday), and has this to say (my emphasis) about the Sunday.:
So everyone starts milling around the B-1 and B-52, with the crews chatting to everyone, pointing out things of interest and generally having a perfectly good time. And then the RAF police arrive, consider that having members of the public wandering around the B-52 isn’t a good idea, and so take up position under each wing where they can politely tell us all to keep back. Not sure why they thought the B-52 needed their protection when they weren’t the slightest bit concerned about the B-1, but obviously they had their orders from someone…
Ahem.
Post-postscript. I mentioned this to my sister a little while afterwards. She’d been on duty that day and said yeah, the Sceptics had their tits in a tangle over a security incident.
Post-post-postscript. I had the absolute delight of seeing Geoff and his lovely wife Beth again at Pawn 2’s wedding back in August this year. It must have been more than 20 years since I’ve seen them. That made me very happy.
