Well I made the annual 160 mile round trip to see what the event would produce and basically it was a total washout. As far as I recall, it was much worse than last year. It started raining as I parked, circa 11:10, and didnt really stop for anything more than a minute or two until the show ended about 15:45. The rain was mostly heavy and it was also very windy. Fortunately I took a spare set of clothes !
Initially, "Static" was only a Chipmunk and a Cessna 182S. Breitling 2 and 3 subsequently turned up as did a Harvard, the Swift Glider Team and the JP. Apart from the Cessna, all of these bravely displayed.
The West Midlands Air Ambulance arrived and stayed on another part of the site for most of the day and there was at least one helicopter flying around, presumably giving rides. I didn't bother investigating.
The only other attendees were an Apache en route to Cosford (it made short display but not where expected !), a flypast by a Merlin of 28Sqn (ex London flypast and en route to Benson), and a short display by the Sea Fury T20. One of the Spitfires due to attend apparently stayed at Gloucester.
I was totally drenched within about 15 minutes of arriving ....however I thought I might get some unusual photos so stayed. Not suprisingly I had a few problems with my cameras (as well as being unable to see through the viewfinders lol) ! More frustating however was the discovery made when I uploaded the pics to the pc that soon after the flying started, I'd accidentally changed some camera settings (probably during futile attempts at trying to keep the cameras reasonably dry), which I'd not noticed and which has caused most of the images to be useless
If anyone can confirm the identity of the Apache, it would be appreciated.