Sunday, May 18, 2008

A beautiful sight

I may have mentioned before that I'm a real fan of vintage aircraft. It's very rare to see these old biplanes fly, but every so often they drag them out of the museum at the Shuttleworth Collection, and put them in the air. It's even rarer to see a triplane in the air. This is a Sopwith Triplane, the only one anywhere in the world.


Wow. What an evocative silhouette.

And that's not all. Check this out.


If it looks like something out of Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, that's because it is. It's a Bristol Box Kite, and in the movie, it was The Phoenix Flyer, piloted by Stuart Whitman. It's not often you get to see something like this pottering about.

2 comments:

Kate Fosk said...

Wow, great shot :)
Kate

Matt Kelland said...

Old Warden is the bestest place I know of for getting great shots. It's a tiny little airfield, unlike the big shows such as Duxford, and the pilots fly really close to the crowd and really low, so you can get good pics even with crappy cameras - some people were getting great shots with phones.

And, of course, the fact that the aircraft are so slow and manoeuvrable makes them very easily to photograph, not like trying to snap an F16 doing Mach 2.