The Spitfire passes low over the runway around eleven o'clock most flying days. If you are stood near the perimeter, you feel it before you hear it.
Duxford is the airfield from which No. 310 Squadron — the squadron our showroom is named for — was raised in July 1940. It is fourteen miles south of Fenstanton. On a clear March Saturday, a handful of us drove down for the first flying day of the year.
The flying days at Duxford are run by the Imperial War Museum. The aircraft are mostly preserved survivors from the war and the inter-war years, kept airworthy by a small army of volunteers, engineers, and the occasional retired RAF pilot who agreed to "do one more" twenty years ago and is still doing them.
On a flying day you can stand outside Hangar 2 and watch the day's aircraft taxi past at walking pace, on their way to the apron. The Spitfire's engine note at idle is hard to describe to anyone who has not heard it: a kind of throaty mechanical conversation between twelve cylinders that, when the throttle opens, becomes a single sustained roar.
We left at 14:00 to beat the traffic on the M11. The next IWM flying day is in May. We will be there. If you would like to come — particularly if you have not heard a Merlin in person — let us know.
