The setting: Duxford for Flying Legends airshow, 1995-ish, around 1800 or
so. I was a volunteer for The Fighter Collection at the time, assigned for
that day to look after the Corsair which was the last aircraft parked on the
display line, at the departure end of the parallel taxiway. Gorgeous sunny
summer day with big, fluffy clouds way up high. It had been a great day of
flying, everything from Mustangs, Spits, the B-17 "Sally B", B-25, Corsairs,
all the 'Cats, Spads, and probably some other stuff I can't remember. We
had a total of 19 Merlin powered fighters on the flightline that day.

Being at the departure end of the taxiway, everything had to taxi past me to
get to the runup area and then the runway.

At the end of each Flying Legends airshow, the last formation is a Balboa, a
massed formation of everything on the flightline up in the sky at once. The
Corsair I was minding was already gone, so the distinction of the end of the
parking line was lost. The Mustangs and Spits were due to go off together
and started to taxi past me one-by-one to do their runups. But there were
too many of them for the small runup area to hold all at once. So they
turned into wind wherever they could.

I suddenly found myself surrounded on 3 sides by all the Spits and Mustangs
doing their runups at the same time - 19 Merlins revving up, churning the
air with their props, making the ground shake, creating a deafening sweet
racket which I couldn't bring myself to block from my ears. They rang for 8
hours afterward but it was worth every minute.

And I remember thinking, while standing on the WW2 Spit and Mustang base,
that this must have been what the base sounded like in 1944. It was one of
the few times in my life I actually felt like I'd been allowed to step back
in time.

All of that because of the noise...

Shawn

"DeltaDeltaDelta" wrote in message
...
This came to mind when I heard a RAF VC-10K overflying my house at some
1000
feet AGL at full steam. What a sound! The VC-10 both looks and sounds
powerful. Also, the piston Yak-52 I heard a few days ago...unbelievable,
such a powerful and awe inspiring sound. The only thing I regret is never
hearing a DC-6 at full throttle; watching a documentary on ConAir
firefighting services today (on Discovery Science) I heard one pilot
remark
that those 76 cylinders at full power sound 'like a Hell's Angels
funeral'.

Triple Delta