Some photos from Brooklands

[Stewcumber]

Today is my Birthday!

To celebrate my partner and I went to Brooklands. It's just inside the M25 near London in the UK. It's a car and aeroplane museum built around a race track from 1907 (I think) which was then turned into an airfield for WW2. It looked like this in its hayday:

 

Now it looks like:

(Notice the same bridge in the background of both)

They also have a British Airways Concorde. Fun fact: Due to the heat of flying at 60,000ft, it gains an extra 8 inches in length! The cabin section is on rollers to accommodate this. It could fly from London to New York so fast that, on an evening flight with take off after the sun has set, the pilots would see a sun rise from the west as they were travelling faster than the earth was rotating. Their (and the absolute, I think) record is 2 hours and 52 minutes, from New York to London.

What a great profile!

On the other end of the scale there was the first plane to cross the Atlantic, the Vickers Vimy, which took 15 hours and 57 minutes to complete the milestone, in 1919. It's a replica from 1994 below.

We also went in Vickers Viscount

 

... and the Sultan of Oman's Vickers VC10. It was pimp!

I find the old planes the most fascinating as it reminds me of my early (and current, if I'm honest!) days of playing KSP. Pushing boundaries of what I thought was possible, what was 'fast', what was long-range.

Finally here is a Bently with "retarded" written on the steering wheel.

See you in the skies and beyond!

[RealKerbal3x]

@Stewcumber Lovely pics! I actually don’t live far from Brooklands myself so I have the opportunity of visiting without too much trouble. It’s a shame that it’s so expensive to see inside Concorde because it’s one of my favourite aircraft, but I guess they’ve got to find money to maintain the museum and all of those exhibits somewhere.

[LordFerret]

Hovercar! 

The seatbelt on the bed is over the top.

Great pics!  Thanks for sharing!