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BBMF Spitfire crash

gez said:
32,000 in the context of the UKs population is far far far less than " a handful". 0.05% in fact.
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But may well have been the limit for that venue. Duxford sells out all available tickets, quite often weeks ahead, for its air shows. In fact, the last ‘Flying Day’ sold out a few days ahead of the event, and that wasn’t anything like a proper airshow.

Fire safety, car park capacity, toilets will all affect the capacity. Demand, especially for a sunny weekend, is little to do with it.
 
tuga said:
That's a bit subjective, though.
My kids used to enjoy watching the flights coming in from our living room window at a very young age, with Lisbon airport being so close to the city centre. My eldest's first word was airplane. They knew many of the airline logos and some of the aricraft models. Today they have no interest in planes.
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And boy do the planes come in low to land at Lisbon too! I can't imagine what it must be like to live under the landing flight path!!
 
tuga said:
Also they proportion of people being entertained might be a lot slighter than those being bothered by it...
A few years ago there was a swarm of old warplanes flying over our place here in Oxford. Bloody noisy and totally unnecessary.
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Same with churches, last time stayed at The Parsonage they starting playing with the bells at some ungodly hour.

Again a very small proportion of the population being entertained.
 
Seeker,

Neurons don’t divide much, certainly nothing like the cells in your skin, GI tract and blood. Lots of replacement going on, but not so much in the core, souly bits. In that sense, we‘re more like a computer where lots of the peripheral bits are repaired and replaced to a point, but the CPU, RAM and HD get a bit flakier and shittier with each passing year.

There certainly are days where I feel like a hard drive that’s spinning madly without that little green access light coming on much.

Joe
 
Tony Lockhart said:
But may well have been the limit for that venue. Duxford sells out all available tickets, quite often weeks ahead, for its air shows. In fact, the last ‘Flying Day’ sold out a few days ahead of the event, and that wasn’t anything like a proper airshow.

Fire safety, car park capacity, toilets will all affect the capacity. Demand, especially for a sunny weekend, is little to do with it.
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Yeah, I was really only pointing out the oft made logical mistake of seeing a large number and presuming that number somehow can be extrapolated to the whole population.

Another common one, is that made by people who like to modify their cars (for whatever reason). They will often state. "lot's of people modify cars, it's a massive community, look at all the forums and shows full of them. thousands turn up" as some kind of argument against/for what car manufacturers do when producing a vehicle. Somehow believing that the numbers mean the modding community should be listened to by manufacturers or somehow are relevant in any way in deterimining what people really want from cars. They forget that even their community of (lets be generous and say) 100,000 modder car owners in the uk is insigificant out of the over 30-40 million car owners. (0.4%). So no they don't speak for what car owners actually want.

Similarly, viewing figures of 30,40,50k of such exhibition flights really don't speak to the views of the UKs general population on the topic. Though, I'd accept that they probably do more so than any car modding community does regards cars in general.
 
Tony Lockhart said:
A plane has to get very, very low in order to land.
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Well clearly :)

Lisbon is quite hilly, so planes landing at lisbon airport coming in to land (presumably on a standard vector), come much closer to the roof tops of bulidings below than they do in most other airports (at least of all the ones I've flown in to). Congonhas in Sao Paulo is another one, as it's in the centre of the City.
 
gez said:
32,000 in the context of the UKs population is far far far less than " a handful". 0.05% in fact.
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It would be a decent turnout for a mid range football match. Do you want to ban those too? You can for me, I don't care if I never see another game.
 
gez said:
Ok, given that you clearly know more about that than I, I'll concede that point. But surely if that's the case eventually one has to start questioning if what is being watched is really an authentic plane or not? If in another 50 years time the only original part is the seat, then where is the actual value in them? I'd far rather be able to see an authentic original machine up close in a museum than some small spot of a plane up in the sky that has literally no original WWII part in it. At that point it's nothing more than a faximile of a spitfire.
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The same goes for classic racing cars, but at the end of the day these things were series manufactured to a specification using series manufactured parts from a number of suppliers. Let's say that I had an "original" that came out of the factory in 1941. It fought in the BoB, was damaged and repaired a dozen times, at what point is it no longer "original" ? What if a wartime mechanic robbed a part from a Mk8 and made it fit a Mk9? What if someone did the same in 1946, 56 or 2016? At what point is it no longer "original" ?
 
stevec67 said:
It would be a decent turnout for a mid range football match. Do you want to ban those too? You can for me, I don't care if I never see another game.
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I've made my points as to why I believe these flights should be stopped, and it's nothing to do with how entertaining to people they are or aren't. I've already said I know people enjoy them, as I have myself in the past. My point of view is not based on the popularity of these shows, to me that is an irrelevance. I'm only concerned about preserving our rare historical heritage. For that reason, in my view I feel we're playing too loose and free with these precious aircraft.

The numbers comments I've made (as I've clarified above) is nothing to do with the topic of these flights but purely to point out the irrelevance of arguments based on "but X thousand people think Y, so it must be right/wrong". When X is in fact a tiny insigificant fraction of the total population size in question.

But to address your comparison. Football is attended by close on to a million people every weekend throughout the season. That's nearly 1 million people going to watch something week after week for several months. Hardly comparible with a few tens of thousands for how many events each year? 10? 20? 50?
 
stevec67 said:
The same goes for classic racing cars, but at the end of the day these things were series manufactured to a specification using series manufactured parts from a number of suppliers. Let's say that I had an "original" that came out of the factory in 1941. It fought in the BoB, was damaged and repaired a dozen times, at what point is it no longer "original" ? What if a wartime mechanic robbed a part from a Mk8 and made it fit a Mk9? What if someone did the same in 1946, 56 or 2016? At what point is it no longer "original" ?
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Not my decision to make, and opinions will clearly vary significant. There are people in the classic car market that would call a car non original if it had literally one part that wasn't what the car had coming out of the factory, for example. They even believe the faded, practically non existant original paint is a million times more preferable to the car ever having been touched up or respayed. Then there are others who are far more pragmatic about it.

But if one were to take a rational logical view on the question it would be reasonable to put a figure of 50% being the limiting factor to be able to claim if something is still original or not.
 
gez said:
Yeah, I was really only pointing out the oft made logical mistake of seeing a large number and presuming that number somehow can be extrapolated to the whole population.

Another common one, is that made by people who like to modify their cars (for whatever reason). They will often state. "lot's of people modify cars, it's a massive community, look at all the forums and shows full of them. thousands turn up" as some kind of argument against/for what car manufacturers do when producing a vehicle. Somehow believing that the numbers mean the modding community should be listened to by manufacturers or somehow are relevant in any way in deterimining what people really want from cars. They forget that even their community of (lets be generous and say) 100,000 modder car owners in the uk is insigificant out of the over 30-40 million car owners. (0.4%). So no they don't speak for what car owners actually want.

Similarly, viewing figures of 30,40,50k of such exhibition flights really don't speak to the views of the UKs general population on the topic. Though, I'd accept that they probably do more so than any car modding community does regards cars in general.
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I’m sure plenty of people from Scotland, Wales, Cornwall etc would love to visit Duxford for an airshow, but travelling time and £££ makes it difficult for most. Duxford used to attract lots of airshow goers from Europe, but I’m not sure how many do that now. Probably don’t want to receive abuse at the nearest Shell station.

Consider this: many thousands of people are willing to pay in advance for a non-refundable ticket that’s £50 or so, for an event that stands a high chance of being ruined by poor weather and aircraft no-shows. There aren’t many events in the U.K. that can claim that.
 
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