RAF East Fortune Airfield

United Kingdom / Scotland / Dirleton /
 airport, museum, Second World War 1939-1945
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WW2 Airfield, now houses the museum of flight

Avro Vulcan XM597 at Scotland's excellent National Museum of Flight. She entered service with 12 squadron on the 27th of August 1963, then served with 35, 50, 9, 101 and 35 squadrons, including use in the Falklands on Black Buck missions. Retired to East Fortune shortly afterward. She's in excellent condition and very well-maintained, though is purely static, not in running condition. Many panel lines are sealed against the weather and her undercarriage bays have mesh across them to stop birds nesting in there. She was repainted with gloss paint in 1994 to help preserve her too and is kept in excellent nick. Her cockpit is not usually open to the public, but sometimes the museum have special event days such as Air Days in 1997 and 1998, and on those occasions the cockpit was opened up for visitors. Bob's picture taken 3 years after my last visit shows her to be in just as good condition as in 1997

They have Mcdonnel Douglas F4S 155848, she first flew in 1968 as an F-4J and flew as such with the US Navy before being converted to F-4S standard and transferring to the US Marine Corps in 1978. In 1983 she was retired and the Fleet Air Arm Museum acquired her not long afterwards in a strange deal that saw Scimitar XD220 crossing the pond in the opposite direction. Initially painted in RN colours and displayed at the museum, when they got hold of FG.1 XT596, this F-4 became surplus to requirements and languished on the airfield for a long time while all and sundry fought over her - it seems there wasn't a museum in the UK that didn't want to get hold of her. Unfortunately the usual Phantom bureaucrats were meddling, and it looked like she was going to be scrapped until, all of a sudden it seemed, the National Museum of Flight won the battle and she was handed over to them in May 1999. She's displayed in the colours of the USMC's VMFA 232, and looks pretty swish

Home of the De-Havilland Comet C-4 G-BDIX

Comet 4C (Registration G-BDIX) is on display at the Museum of Flight at East Fortune near Edinburgh, Scotland in Dan-Air livery.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Flight_%28Scotland%29

A sharper aerial photo is on maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=55.995489~-2.721793&s...
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   55°59'59"N   2°43'14"W

Comments

  • Shame about the clouds.
  • i was going to say that. feh.
  • oh yeah there's a concorde here you can go in and have a look at.
  • Also a Sunday Market
  • Also a Vulcan bomber and a Comet airliner, and others too numerous to mention. Great place for a visit.....part of the National Museum of Scotland. Usually has an air display as good as any anywhere towards the end of July each year.
This article was last modified 3 years ago