I've never seen an AWACS in flight, so bowels intact...
I'm sure I have a photo from the same Greenham airshow if I can find it. I think it's in darkest Somerset, though.
The one I'm thinking of is a Boeing 707 with a fuck-off-big frisbee on top of it. I'm not sure which bit keeps the whole plot in the air.
The MoD spent a small fortune designing an AER Nimrod, but cancelled after great expense in the early nineties (I think).
What really, truly hurt, was the loss of the old Fairy Gannet. They decommissioned them in 1978 when they retired the old Ark Royal (and transferred the Navy's Phantoms to the RAF at the same time)
This really hit home (literally) in the Falklands in '82. There was no wide ranging air-traffic control to warn of Super-Etendards and Exocets and so we lost the Atlantic Conveyor and all of her Chinooks, the boys had to yomp the length of East Falkland as a result. HMS Sheffield was taken as were Sirs Tristram and Galahad. I'll never forget the utter silence in our dormitory in our school as we learnt the news of Sheffield. War was something that happened in grandad's time. Couldn't happen in our time, no, oh no... We just sat there, thoroughly deflated, filleted, in fact.
I remember at about the same time, a Kenyan lad declaring his support for the Argentines as thought it were a football tournament. Fortunately, some of the older ones saw wise to this and managed to restrain the murderously incensed crowd before murder was done. The school, for what it's worth, launched Field-Marshall Haig's career. Never a good place to be controversial on military matters.
In the end, the Navy sunk the cruiser Belgrano with the loss of 700 lives, the Veinticinco De Mayo (aircraft carrier and flagship) never ventured from port and the RAF put on a showcase long-distance bombing raid by putting the ageing Vulcan fleet through a 16,000 mile return journey to put a few craters in Port Stanley runway.
I remember it as a mucky business, the last gasp of a military Junta whose motives still defy scrutiny from this quarter. Of course it gave Maggie another four years.
My heart goes to those who lost their lives, those who lost limbs and those who were brought to an unhappy life thereafter. May we remember this every November.
Yeovilton didn't have an airshow that year as they were resurfacing the main runway. They took the opportunity while most of the lads and there machines were down South. They did make it up to the public the following year and fairly everything they'd captured in the South Atlantic was on display. I remember the endless ranks of Argentine munitions, laid out for the length of a football pitch.
The relief was palpable.
Prize exhibit was a Pucara, that bane of the ground troops. They only brought one back, it's canopy shattered. The Sea Harriers had destroyed the rest.
War is always a nasty business. I'll not decry the need for it when all diplomacy has been exhausted and I rest a little easier in knowing that our armed forces are among the best.
[I don't claim this dissertation as authoritative by any means; if you were there please correct me on any point where I'm awry. Military history is a part-time involvement of mine and I like to have things just so. Shame I can't ask grandad about signing with the Somerset Light Infantry and serving with the Royal Engineers.)