RIAT dispatch

That's the Royal International Air Tattoo to you. Held at the US airbase at Fairford in Wiltshire, it is touted as the biggest airshow in the world, though I am not certain this is true. But it is big. Dozens of interesting planes were on show for the the 50-odd thousand visitors to gawp at, including the strange P22 Osprey, an American VTOL (vertical take off and landing) plane which rotates its whole wing to direct the thrust from its twin propellers, though there seems to be a design fault, in so far as the propellers are so long that it cannot land as an aircraft usually does, and MUST land vertically. So if the machanism for moving the wings jams in flight, it's fucked.

There were other iconic planes on display, including the B2 stealth bomber, a plane so strange and un-worldly looking it is easy to see how it stimulated hundreds of UFO reports while it was under secret testing, and a B52 bomber, that huge and terrifying weapon of war that carried the US's strategic nuclear force from the 50s, right through to the Millennium, in addition to dropping more ordnance on Vietnam than the US did on Germany in the whole of WW2.

A slight problem for me was that I had to get right up to things to see them properly because of my eyes, and anything in the sky was invisible until I found it with my compact bins. Never has a pair of field glasses come in more handy than on this day.

The two highlights? First, a Dutch pilot putting an F15 Eagle through its paces in amazing little demonstration of power and grace. At one point, the aircraft headed straight up; then it actually seemed to stop still in the air for a second, before curving slowly back down into a gentle dive. The second and possibly the greatest moment for me: the flypast of the only remaining Lancaster bomber, with its two escorts, a Spitfire and a Hurricane. The sight, and especially the sound of those piston engines throbbing through the damp air of the aerodrome, brought forth a powerful surge of emotion from deep within me, as I remembered the brave men who fought and died for their country in these war machines, and the terrible destruction wrought by their actions.