A Cheesy Trip, Day 5 - Aircraft, Lots of Aircraft

The main reason I decided to come back to Somerset was to visit the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton. When I started the detailed planning I found they’re not open Monday or Tuesday so it ended up being today before I got there. There are plenty of planes and helicopters to see, from the earliest to displays about, if not actual aircraft, the latest. They’ve also got a Concord (but then where hasn’t? 😀) which doesn’t really fit in. It is the first British one, number 002, so is historical in its own way, but not really a Naval plane. 

Replica Short S27 of 1910, an improved version was the first plane to successfully take off from a ship in 1912 

Just 65 years later Concord commenced supersonic passenger flights

Some parts of the Museum are very well done, including effectively taking you through a 1970s aircraft carrier by means of presentations and displays. I also found some of the information of the QE Class carriers interesting, I hadn’t really noted that they have two separate control islands, The principle of a single island on the starboard (right) side of the deck had been established on the earliest such ships but there are several benefits to splitting the ship control from the flight control including redundancy of systems and reduced wind turbulence. They’re on the right as most single prop planes naturally turn left so away from the structure, of course this is no longer an issue! 

It’s ironic that this Short S184 survived the First World War but was damaged when the Imperial War Museum was bombed in WW II!

Helicopters are as important as planes in naval aviation, possibly even more so, and I guess we tend to think of their search and rescue role, although civilian SAR is now in private hands. Of course they have a strong military purpose as well, be it ferrying personal and stores, detecting submarines (and potentially depth charging or torpedoing them), etc. All bar one of this group saw action in the Falklands War. 

I had the customary cup of coffee whilst looking round but didn’t fancy the cafe for lunch so when I left I did a search for a farm shop and found one the other side of Yeovil. The food was really good but again the shop was just prepack frozen stuff so no use to me - not that it matters as tomorrow I’m moving on to the hotel in Devon.

Sign of the day, outside a farm, “For sale, fresh eggs and pony poo!”