Royal Air Force

Hutton's CV did not indicate there was anything about him suiting him to a role in MI9.

He had been a journalist, worked in publicity in Hollywood and had been a pilot in the Royal Air Force in the First World War, but none of that got him the job.

What did was his casual reference to trying to get the better of Harry Houdini, the world's greatest escapologist.

During his interview for MI9, Hutton told the story of how he'd written to Houdini, challenging him to escape from a box in full view of the audience.

Three airports in the UK are hit by a cyber attack with data of eight point seven million customers accessed, and the Qantas retirement plan marks another step in the Airbus A380 decline.

In the military segment, Boeing maneuv- or moves a second RAF E7A wedge tail to Boscombe Down for the next phase of military acceptance under Britain's three-year aircraft program, and we mark 70 years since the first flight of the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker.

We'll also be talking about the Jersey Air Display that Nev will be attending on Thursday the 10th of September, and we've also got a double helping of the retro airline ad of the week.

And joining me this week from his glorious Buckinghamshire rainy, slightly rainy, uh, countryside studio is, of course, Neville Bounds.

Roger, three bogeys.

[upbeat music]

And the first story this week comes to us from DefenseIndustry.eu. Um, Boeing moves a second RAF E-7A Wedgetail to Boscombe Down for next phase of military acceptance under Britain's three aircraft program.

So Boeing has shown the second E-7A Wedgetail intended for the Royal Air Force in its final paint scheme after the aircraft arrived at Boscombe Down.

My name is Carlos, and in this week's show we have another BA slide whoopsie, an A320 takes a bash on the nose, a possible resurgence of the A300, and we report on the 767 incident at Miami.

In the military news, we have the sad incident of the F4 crash in Greece, plus an RAF deployment to a remote Arctic island.

As usual, we'll have our retro airline out of the week, plus it's time to reveal the winner in our book competition.

And Nick is talking... uh, taking us, I should say, on our travels this week with a trip on an ATR in the Canary Islands.

What would've helped would be proper crew briefing and coordination prior to the pr- approach.

Yeah, I mean, there, there was some ...

I mean, this for me, this is, this goes back to, um, RAF Northolt, um, years ago, um, where a very similar accident happened where this was a, a, a executive jet rather than a, uh, uh, anything else.

But it was, um, yeah, sh- touched down halfway down the runway with a tailwind, with the crew arguing between them about who was doing what.

Keith Allen's father was a submariner.

Dawn's father was in the RAF.

And my parents were in the Viet Cong Army.

And what was their attitude with what you were to believe? Were you going to make your own mind up about things, son, or was it, no, you are a Marxist and that's the end of

That's a story for a different day.

And they did that after assessing a whole bunch of different RAF types.

They looked at the Hurricane.

They looked at some of the other aircraft that were under development at the time and decided that the Wildcat was the best interim solution.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the whole, you know, aircraft for Battle of Britain versus we got to – the Fleet Air Arm Royal Navy and the Army and the RAF were no different than our modern USAF, U.S. Navy, and the Army, is that they're all competing for the same dollars.

Well, they were all competing for the same resources.

The Blue Strike missile was designed, built and initially tested not in Australia but in England.

Specifically, it was tested at RAF Spadum, a Royal Air Force facility in Cumberland, only a few miles from Brough Marsh.

The suggestion in the folklore that grew up around the case was that there was some connection between the British rocket program, the figures at Woomera, and the figure that had appeared behind Elizabeth Templeton on the marsh.

That the spacemen, whatever they were, had some interest in the Blue Streak and had been present at both the English site where it was built and the Australian site where it was launched.

I mean, it's a big kind of part of the preparations for D-Day, which we just haven't heard about It took someone like Ken to get that story out there and to give those people who died and their families and the survivors a voice and something to kind of remember it by.

During the war, Northern Ireland had 28 airfields, home to both RAF and US Army Air Force crews.

Whether through combat damage, mechanical failure or pilot error, Not every plane returned home.

For our final dig, a team of archaeologists has been joined by an army of volunteer schoolchildren from both sides of the Irish border, and they are excavating the site of a crashed American fighter plane.

is travelling to Port Slade to find out how post-excavation work following a Chichester dig is making sense of Britain's lost landscapes.

For the last two years, Southern Water have been laying a 10-kilometre pipeline, cutting through town and country, and they paid Archaeology South East to monitor their work.

As they dug the areas where the pipes were to be laid, they found prehistoric hinges Roman settlement and burial, and RAF bases from World War II.

But most intriguingly, they have unearthed a buried medieval village.