Little Grandson Car and Airshow
Little Gransden is a small village NE of Biggleswade. Each Summer Bank holiday Sun it runs a Car and Airshow, with the profits going to the BBC Children in Need charity.
P-51 Mustang, Marinell. Marinell was constructed at the Inglewood plant of North American Aviation in California as 44-13521 for the USAAF and shipped to Britain on D-Day, 6th June 1944. The aircraft was taken on charge at the end of the month by the 504th Fighter Squadron of the 339th Fighter Group, stationed at Fowlmere in Cambridgeshire. Quickly the airframe was allocated to Captain Bradford V. Stevens who christened it with the moniker it still wears to this day. Over the course of the next six weeks the aeroplane went on to notch up four confirmed victories in combat. Unfortunately, ‘Marinell’ was downed on 13th August 1944 during a dive-bombing mission over Feuquières in France with the tragic loss of her pilot that day, 2nd Lt. Myer R. Winkelman.
The airshow is held on the bank holiday Sunday each year and in previous years it always clashed with something else so this was my first visit. I wasn’t sure of the layout of the airfield but was pleased to see that it was predominantly facing north so the Sun, the light would be over my left shoulder for the day. What was very unusual is that the flight line was like a L a capital L this meant the aircraft approaching the airfield flew down both sides effectively an arc and they flew topside which made looking at the aircraft in photograph in the aircraft very much easier.
Due to the weather specifically how windy it was, some of the scheduled displays were cancelled. There was meant to be a parachute display team, a pair of World War I aircraft, and the Battle of Britain Memorial flight Lancaster all of which due to the wind were not appearing.
It was a full agenda and the displays were excellent.Surprisingly, the display that got the most applause was for a radio controlled aircraft. They had a radio controlled F4 tomcat on display, which was approximately 16 scale so it was about 10 or 11 foot long. The display was to the theme of Top Gun with some of the narration coming from clips from the film.
The other unusual aspect of the show was that there was a church service at 2:37 pm from the local Vic. This consisted of a couple of prayers and reading culminating in the last post. What are you doing on the airfield with silent and a hurricane flew over providing a solo display.I came away with a lot of good photographs, I was pleased that had gone and it will be a definite airshow for next year.
The only unfortunate aspect of the afternoon was the chaos leaving the parking fields opposite. It was one Stewart. The car park. There was one Paul Stewart, trying to control cars coming from about eight different directions. I think it took about 40 minutes to leave the car park.
