D-Day anniversary at the Royal Air Force Museum

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The Royal Air Force Museum at RAF Cosford is open all year but traditionally holds a major event on the Sunday immediately following D-Day (6th June). I've been making an annual pilgrimage to the event since my father passed on. There are flying displays, exhibitions and a large funfair and many other entertainments. With over 50,000 people arriving by road, rail and air (RAF Cosford has its own train station and extra trains are run for the event), I beat the traffic and drove to Coventry Airport to complete the last 35 miles of the journey in this fine C-47 Dakota.

KK116 was delivered new to the Royal Air Force in 1944 and served in the Berlin Airlift in 1948.

After a spell of civilian use as a pasenger airliner and then a freighter, this grand old bird now takes to the air only for special events.

A twenty minute flight brought us overhead RAF Cosford where we see obsolete Jet Provost trainers and Sepecat Jaguar fighters which are now used as ground instruction airframes at this training base. Elementary flying is also taught here but the main emphasis is on trades, engineers, radar technicians, chefs etc.

Some idea of the scale of today's event can be had from this aerial view of a section of the visitors' car park.

Landing at RAF Cosford.

RAF kilt, Freelander Sporran and Dakota