Here you can see a photograph of what went on at the biggest airshow in the world at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire over the weekend of July 12th & 13th.

That’s it. nothing, no aircraft, no airshow. The whole thing was cancelled.

Military Aviation photography is one of my favourite photographic pursuits & RIAT really is the pinnacle of airshows in Europe. I couldn’t make it last year so this year was determined to attend, so much so that I took 4 days. Thursday I got all my stuff ready, charged batteries, made sure I had spare memory cards & batteries & all the kit was ready & working. Despite the fact that the airshow was sponsored by Barclays Bank & they were selling tickets at selected branches, none of the banks in my local towns had any & I found it impossible to find out by phone and visiting the bank, which branches actually had them. In the end I had to travel some distance to St Albans to get them from a branch of Robert Dyas at £32.50 each.

I went down to Wiltshire on Friday morning & found a camp site at the back of a pub about 30 miles south of the airbase. I had an early might under canvass (yes, it rained) & set off for the airshow at 6am on Saturday. As I started to pick up the signs to the airshow I found that most of them had white stickers across them with ‘AIRSHOW CANCELLED‘ in red. I thought that maybe peace protesters had been out overnight but when I got to the Gloucestershire border I found the police turning people back. The airbase viewing & parking areas were swamped with recent rain. They announced that they’d make a decision about whether Sunday would go ahead on Saturday afternoon.

I turned round, found a layby & studied the SatNav to find a suitable location to take some photos. I ended up driving 85 miles to Portsmouth (shots to follow).

Saturday night, I was hopeful that Sunday’s display would go ahead, it hadn’t rained all day. Sadly, it was also cancelled. By the time I found out it was too late to come home so I stayed in the pub by the campsite & made my way home on Sunday morning.

The really annoying thing was that Duxford’s Summer Airshow was the same two days, had I realised RIAT was going to be cancelled I could have gone to Duxford, instead I got neither.

And it’s going to take up to eight weeks to get my ticket money back.