Embassy Air Tattoo, Greenham Common, 07th July 1973

One of our number, David Draycott, recently had an 'Adventure Down Under' and relocated to work in Australia for a period.  As this all happened at relatively short notice, some of the 580 crew were given the responsibility of disposing of most of his modelling assets.  This we duly did and 'wired' the proceeds to him while he 'lapped up the sun', opened a tinnie and lit up the barbie.

However, some of the items 'Diddy' gave us simply had no monetary value and so we had to find 'ingenious' ways of disposing of them.  Most of these 'ingenious' ways were actually spectacular failures and as a result even though he is now back from Australia I still have various of these assets in my garage and awaiting a suitable opportunity to return to whence they came.

However, one item I kept, as it is simply great to flick through and look at the extraordinary variety of the scene in those days, is the log book of his visits to military aircraft bases and air shows, which dates back to 1973. This book will also be returning to Dave, but first I will be presenting a few pages from this log book to simply share the nostalgia, with his kind permission

The first entry is the Embassy Air Tattoo at Greenham Common in early July 1973.  This is interesting in several respects in that this was the first year of the International Air Tattoo at Greenham Common, which occurred just two weeks later.  I'm sure many of the subjects stayed around and were present at the larger event, but there is no log of this event unfortunately.

Finally, while researching some of the aircraft I found that if you put the aircraft serial into an internet search engine then more often than not it brings up images of the required subject and you can treat it like your own personal air show.  Enjoy!

Geoff Cooper-Smith, Site Editor