ON THE SOAPBOX: Help Brooklands Please
It is the first Monday of the month and ABTN continues with its tradition of offering industry leaders to put their personal points of view. For September it is New Zealander Allan Winn, Director Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, South West London. In 1989 he became editor of Flight International following a spell in a similar position with Commercial Motor. He is a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and liveryman of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators. He is also the proud owner of a 3-litre vintage Bentley.
”Just one month ago, Brooklands Museum officially opened its latest exhibit, Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde 202, G-BBDG, the most expensive restoration this small private-sector charity has ever undertaken. Delta Golf, received from British Airways as a stripped-out hulk which only just survived a 22-year career as a spares ship for the rest of BA”s Concorde fleet, had to be cut into five major sections for transport the 100 miles from Filton and rebuilt at Weybridge. And then this bare shell, with the aid of some 45 lorry-loads of components, had to be turned into a working exhibit which now gives visitors the closest approximation available anywhere to flying in a Concorde. They sit in the real seats, hear and feel the rumble of Olympus engines on full reheat, and watch the cabin displays flick through Mach1 and Mach 2 in a vivid reminder of the progress which we have lost with the retirement of the world”s only supersonic airliner to see commercial service.
Brooklands enjoys the distinction of having been arguably the most prolific aircraft production site in Europe, with over 18,500 aircraft of nearly 260 different types assembled or completed there over an 80-year period. Almost the last in that unmatched line-up was Concorde, with roughly half of every airframe having been built at Brooklands. The consolidation and streamlining of the industry over the last 50 years have seen most of the evidence of that staggering legacy obliterated, with just one Bellman Hangar remaining of the buildings in which thousands of people created some of the greatest aircraft of the first century of flight. But the aircraft themselves remain as an inspiration to future generations ” be it from the big idea of getting airborne at all (with our replica of A V Roe”s biplane which got airborne at Brooklands in June 1908), or getting aloft on vectored thrust (Sidney Camm”s P1127 and Harrier), or cruising supersonically without reheat as Concorde”s clever intake design allowed it to do decades before the military invented ”supercruise”.
There is now nowhere in the UK where members of the general public can see large aircraft being built or assembled, so it has become incumbent on museums such as ours to show visitors just how aircraft were and are put together, and what”s under the skin. We have the ultimate example at Brooklands in our Vickers Wellington bomber, recovered 21 years ago from a 42-year sojourn at the bottom of Loch Ness. Its distinctive Barnes Wallis ”geodetic” structure has been left largely uncovered so that visitors can appreciate how it was built, how the controls work etc. Again, our Concorde has sections left unlined internally, so that the intricacies and cleverness of its machined-from-solid structure (and our structural repairs following dismantling for transport) can be appreciated. We will do more of this as our project to restore our 1940 Bellman Hangar moves forward, and we are able to display major aircraft sections in jigs just as they would have been decades ago.
And inspiration doesn”t have to be on a grand scale ” watching the delight on young children”s faces as they discover for themselves that an egg dropped from a balcony suspended under a bit of cloth and string need not break on landing, or understanding Newton”s third law from launching a water-powered rocket, is proof of that. The grander the scale, however, the greater the possible involvement, as shown by the dozens of students from the University of Surrey and the Farnborough College of Technology who have been able to contribute to our Concorde rebuild. All these students ” thousands of them per year - are meeting aerospace hands-on, not through a computer or television screen, at just one small museum in Surrey, UK.
It is vital that youngsters are able to see these aircraft at close quarters, and to touch and feel them, and that doesn”t happen any more at airports or, indeed, at many airshows and displays. It can at those museums which allow it: at Brooklands we have an ”open cockpit” policy for as many of our large aircraft as we safely can, and young visitors are actually encouraged to take the controls of such as our VC10 and Harrier, and have the effects of those controls explained by volunteer guides. And when we and the University of Surrey finish restoring the old Concorde flight-deck simulator from Filton next year, we will be able to do even more.
And all that introduction, all that inspiration, all that hands-on experience, is delivered largely without cost to the state or to the industry which will benefit from it in years to come. Because Brooklands Museum, like so many other similar private-sector bodies throughout the world, has to rely on admission fees, generally small (though no less welcome for that) private and corporate donations and the work of an army of volunteers (over 500 strong in our case). Many of those volunteers grew up in the industry at Brooklands, or with the airlines which operated Brooklands-built aircraft, and are now giving their spare (and in many cases not-so-spare) time to put something back. And of course Brooklands is not just aviation. It is the site of the world”s first purpose built motor racing circuit, with some of the banking still in existence. Today Brooklands is one of the world”s most unique motoring museums too.
So with all that good work, and all that input from extraordinarily generous ordinary people, why is it that an organisation like Brooklands Museum finds it so difficult to attract real financial support from the industry it does so much to support and represent to the coming generations, their parents and their teachers? We have spent almost ”500,000 of our own cash (most of it borrowed) putting Concorde back together, plus a great deal of help in kind from small local businesses and the support of BA. It”s going to take an awful lot of visitors buying their ”4 boarding cards for the Brooklands Concorde Experience to recoup that sort of investment, far less get Concorde generating the profits that will fund the next ”4m worth of urgent investment needed to safeguard this uniquely important site. Want to help? Call me! +44 (0)1932 857381
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http://www.brooklandsmuseum.com