6 March 2010
The Royal Air Force Museum
The museum is quite a distance out of London, but still on a tube line at Colindale, the total journey takes about an hour after changing etc. I was literally falling asleep on the train even though I am pretty excited as planes are my favourite thing.
Some guys trying hard to be cool got on the train near me and had a fake argument about where the best jazz clubs were in London, it was clear even to me that they knew nothing about jazz but had decided its cool to like jazz so they had better pretend to be experts in order to be in the club. This became more apparent when they couldnt think of the first name of the jazz trumpeter whos name is Coltrane (even I know its John Coltrane and he played a sax, Lisa Simpson would be appalled at these idiots.)
The museum doesnt dissapoint, it actually has a lot more modern planes than I thought. It is however quite dark which makes taking photos quite difficult, but I did my best.
Strangely they have basically no cafe to speak of, just a bored looking girl by an automatic coffee and tea machine, Im in need of coffee to wake up, I think im addicted to caffeine now.
Eurofighter Typhoon, the size doesnt translate, im amazed how big the thing is.
Messssschersmidiiditiimemdit ME 262, I think the most succesful jet engined plane of world war 2.
A harrier, the British made pride of the United States Marine Corp.
A huge world war 2 bomber, forget what but its not a lancaster (they had those also), strange thing about this one is it was presented to the museum by a Pakistani guy who seems to have owned it after the war.
A tornado, the black thing I think is one of those cool cluster bombs that are used to destroy runways, which was the best mission on the Tornado simulator game for PC in 1990.
A buccaneer that appears to have been sandblasted.
Heres what I managed to do to their touchscreen kiosk thing.
Front of a Vulcan bomber, you can see how big it is if you enlarge the picture and see the dummy standing by the landing gear.
The rear of the Vulcan bomber, the wing area is ridiculously huge, I cant work out how they got it in there, theres no airfield nearby.
Canberra bomber, Australia named thier capital city after this mildly succesful bomber, which is fitting.
A crappy angle of a lightning, for many years this was the fastest fighter going around, capable of over mach 2, strangely the drop tanks were above wings, im not exactly sure how they jettison them.