Broadback wrote:

Not in the same league, but years ago as a young man living on the
Mendip Hills in Somerset I used to watch the Brabazon flying overhead.
To my young eyes it seemed as though it was going to fall out of the sky
it seemed so slow.

As I kid, during the height of the Cold War I lived close to RAF
Finningley, which used to put on an annual air display, one of the
highlight of which was a demo of the "Vulcan Scramble". As a
six-year-old, the significance of what it all meant was somewhat lost on
me, but in a real-life situation the bombers would have been 'scrambled'
to go and drop their payload of nukes on Moscow, before the inbound
ICBMs hit.

The sight and sound of a squadron of Vulcan bombers all taking off
together really was something else; the ground would literally shake as
these things climbed almost vertically on full afterburn. Awesome stuff!

David