Dragon Rapide wrote:Neilos - That's a point I have emphasised several times but few members are impressed by it. As far as I am concerned it sets Duxford apart as an airshow venue, along with a couple of others, and cannot be ignored.
Well I have taken hundreds of photos in the hangars on show days....in any case hundreds of visitors do not take photos. Another example of viewing the expensive through the enthusiast's eyes without taking account of the fact oft repeated that we are small minority.
The museum doesn't enter my thought process. It may well be there, it may account for a chunk of the ticket price but it's not much of a draw to me by itself, let alone on an airshow day. I would be there for the show and nothing else. As pointed out, if you want a spot at the fence you're likely to have to stake it out for hours, so in that regard it is completely unlike Shuttleworth, where I will always take a look around the hangars (to view restorations like the Spitfire, and to look around the book stalls rather than look around the exhibits themselves).
I'm not convinced by the "minority" argument that persists on here either. I don't think many people take the family for an expensive day out at an airshow unless someone in the family has at least a passing interest. As I've said countless times before, I was introduced to airshows by my dad, who took my brothers and I along to airshows because they were events he enjoyed and thought we would too. Neither of my brothers took an interest but I did, and went on to make airfix kits, collect part-work magazines etc that fuelled my interest between the annual visit to Southend and maybe Duxford. My father would never have been classed as your "stereotypical" enthusiast back then, or even now (my younger brother actually has better aircraft recognition skills than him, despite having zero interest), but we ended up at airshows because someone was interested and took everyone else along. We never went to a boat race or cricket match because dad wasn't interested those.
You don't need to have a notebook or a big lens to have an enthusiasm or interest in the subject matter. What is the distinction between an "enthusiast" and the general public, or my father (who attends lots of airshows, with a camera, enjoys a nice topside, has opinions on most airshow related matters, buys airshow DVDs but doesn't use any internet forums on the subject and couldn't even pick out the BBMF owned Spitfires from a line-up) and "an enthusiast"?