Up on deck, the stars are all here. Naval Aviation heros line the length of the deck, with legendary Army, Air Force, foreign fighters and NASA aircraft peppered throughout.

There's no doubt about it, 2020 has been a pretty big low point for the world, let alone the aviation sector/hobby. With a lack of air shows at the height of a "normal" season, people have been a bit stuck on what to do to get their aviation fix. Even once-busy civil airports seem to have receded to levels unseen for half a century, with even Heathrow seeing take offs and landings resorting to a single runway and minutes apart.

“Sidewinder low level, two ship of Raptors entering at point [static].”

Did I hear that right? The heart begins to race and the mind to wander to whether it could truly be.

When I think of the many hours spent around the Heathrow perimeter, I had a sense of awe as these beauties launched themselves into the air. Happily snapping away, I realised just how much I enjoyed witnessing these 4-engine beasts.

This puts the uniqueness of the Demo in perspective. "Normally our missions are a lot higher than [the Demo], there's not a lot of times that we are yanking and banking the aircraft down at 200 feet," Syndrome commented. "We push it to the limit on all of our flights...it's pretty insane."

Let’s talk about S-MODE. No no…not the operating system used in your typical Windows computer. We’re talking about the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment. NASA 801, along with two other research aircraft and research vessels, will be outfitted with an array of instrumentation for measuring temperature salinity and ocean velocity across various time and spatial scales.

….., I wasn’t sure it would work. Cue the Shuttleworth collection, based at Old Warden Aerodrome, quickly mobilising to offer a Drive-In airshow, just like the old school Drive-In cinemas. I decided to take a gamble, wanting to support a first of its kind, and an industry that had been severely impacted. With tickets bought, I patiently awaited my first airshow since September 2019.

Sitting quietly at home in our quarantined world I sift through endless photos of airshows and events that in the last year alone created a megapixel jam of unprocessed work. For me, editing work has always been more than just processing an image. There has to be a connection, a theme, or a story. It requires hammering away through cerebral granite. I dig and chip away, piece after piece, layer after layer until it becomes a story worth telling. After digging for months, I tap and hear the sound of the treasure trove of distant memories.

…each a glinting tail
across the beams
for the valley, evaporating with navy speed.

We were expertly landed at the aerodrome and the tail wheel settled onto the grass; we taxied back to the apron to shutdown. Even as the engines wound down, I took my time standing up, just enjoying the moment before begrudgingly standing up and stepping down the paratrooper ladder and back to earth. Now was a time to reflect and rehydrate before the afternoon flight with Spitfires.

That we’re committed to making great, well made, affordable timepieces that hopefully are a little more than just instruments to tell time. At a moment when time telling is instantaneous and all around us, we hope to make wearable pieces of machinery that tell a story.

In February 2019, the tour sites began to be made public along with more details on the tour. It was immediately apparent that this tour would be much more ambitious than the ’08 visit, as the tour would take the team across the North American continent from Halifax, Nova Scotia at the start to the conclusion at Huntington Beach, CA over a period of 11 weeks. As luck would have it, they were slated to perform at several sites those of us at Full Disc Aviation were already in planning to cover…

I remember being in the game during my junior year, I knew I wanted to go into aviation since I got to West Point, watching the flyover as we ran out onto the field I thought that would be pretty sick to get a chance to do that.