ESTATES AND HERITAGE
Update
Redwood Tree Services at work on the Members’ Banking in February (Julian Temple).
Estates In January Estates and Heritage staff and volunteers assisted representatives from Historic England who were assessing the condition of our ‘Bofors’ anti-aircraft gun tower and Competitors’ Tunnel. This work included making, and posting on Youtube, a drone video camera survey of the tower and clearing extensive ivy at the tunnel entrance. Other volunteers have formed monthly work parties deployed to our Bicester storage facility where we continue to organise the contents, which currently include four historic vehicles and four replica aeroplanes.
Other specialist volunteers have been busy inspecting the grass airstrip and helicopter landing site which we operate occasionally at Mercedes-Benz World and relocating the Concorde stewards’ portakabin from its initial position beside the Acoustics Building to the opposite side of the new Vimy Pavilion.
Training courses for staff and volunteers have also been arranged to increase our numbers of licensed fork-lift truck operators and those certified to assemble and sign-off mobile access and scaffold towers. Several London Bus Museum volunteers also attended the latter course.
Contractors have again been instrumental in enabling us to tackle larger tasks, including felling an extended group of post-war trees along the lower edge of the Members’ Banking behind the Flight Shed and London Bus Museum, mowing lawns and other grassed areas and carrying out essential repairs to roads and pathways, where action on potholes and trip hazards had been requested recently by our Health & Safety Committee.
Now that spring is here, we are eager to recruit more gardening volunteers to help the very few
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people currently looking after our ‘Garden of Memories’ plus a number of established borders and plant tubs. Anyone with just a few hours to spare every week or two will be warmly welcomed by our Property Manager, Lee Harvey.
Heritage The British Aviation Preservation Council’s latest quarterly meeting, on 25th February at the Helicopter Museum near Weston-Super-Mare, was attended by myself and two volunteers and, besides hearing informative presentations from our hosts and the Aerospace Bristol team from Filton, we had a sneak preview of Weston’s newly-restored 1930s control tower and adjacent exhibition. We were also updated on matters of mutual interest, including the formation of a long overdue All Party Parliamentary Group for Aviation Heritage.
Other off-site activities include monitoring (for insurance reasons) taxying practice and crew training by the dedicated team looking after our ‘live’ VC10 ZA150 at Dunsfold on 28th March. Also attending the British Air Display Association’s annual pre-season conference at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham on 23rd March, to hear the latest from the air display industry, which is still being affected by revised rules and regulations in the aftermath of the AAIB’s report on the 2015 Shoreham Airshow accident. The interesting news was that the number of UK air displays was significantly lower in 2016, as was the number of examiners available to authorise individual pilots to display their aircraft last year. Apart from rising CAA charges, we learned that the RAF's Battle of Britain Memorial Flight and the Royal Navy's Historic Flight will both be introducing charges for all their appearances from 2017. Sadly, our own prospects for any future
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