XH558, the last airworthy Avro Vulcan bomber, hasn’t quietly gone into retirement. Instead, the owners are flying the living hell out of the Flying Flat-Iron before she finally sets down for good at the end of this year. We showed you her display at the Royal International Air Tattoo earlier this year, and we now have footage of XH558’s performance for the Eastbourne Air Show at Beachy Head Cliffs in southeast England. The chalk cliffs have about five hundred or so feet between the grassy hills at the top and the water below, which is plenty of space for the Vulcan to fly in. It presents photographers and video crews a rare opportunity to film the aircraft from above instead of below, and the pilots of XH558 know this well. They put on a beauty of a show for the people on the cliffs, but the people in the boats might have gotten the best part of the show!
(Courtesy: Foxtrot Alpha)
going to see this in action in a couple of weeks 🙂
Well that was nice!
I had the opportunity to see one of these perform at the Chicago air & water show back around 1980. It was the most impressive bird at the show. I still clearly remember that plane turn away from the crowd outbound over lake Michigan and light the afterburners and nose up almost vertical. Wow, what a performance.
Sadly, the Vulcan doesn’t have afterburners. Although it uses the same Rolls Royce Olympus engines as Concorde, they’re not fitted with reheats.