If you want to be reminded of the time when pilots all had moustaches and names like Rupert, Hubert and Hugh then you’re going to absolutely love the RAF Museum. They’ve got more planes than an airport. They’ve got a Spitfire (of course), a Messerschmitt (that’s probably not how you spell it), a Hurricane, a beautiful Lancaster and the rusting hulk of a Halifax bomber that was dredged up from the bottom of a Norwegian lake.
68-8284 - Sikorsky MH-53M Pave Low - AFSOC, USAF by Karl Drage
Via Flickr:
Buy Prints | My 500px | My Facebook This 99 Sqn C-17 gives birth to an MH-53M at RAF Cosford 12 years ago today. The helicopter had been gifted to the RAF Museum and was on delivery. The C-17 movement remains the largest to have taken place from Cosford's very short sub-4000ft runway.
A little bit from a commission I worked on earlier this year illustrating the dare-devil antics of Edith Maude Jones for the RAF Museum. Needless to say it was a total treat to not only do but read up on what Jones got up to (mostly throwing herself from crazy-high altitude balloons)
One of the more up-to-date exhibits at the museum, a Eurofighter Typhoon jet! I saw one of these flying at the East Fortune airshow a couple of years ago, so I can say with some authority that it makes quite a racket. They didn’t have it in a great position for taking photos, though.
Another bit from the large scale #comic I worked on with @rafmuseum’s for their brand-new Building 69 about certified badass edith maude cook. Turn-of-the-century lady aviators were AN AESTHETIC.
The RAF Museum. What can I say? Well, if you’re really, really interested in military planes, this is the museum for you. If you’re interested in the history of the RAF as a whole and global conflicts, maybe less so.
But I did get a lot of cool plane photos…
So, the museum is split into four main sections, although the last one I didn’t visit because there were a lot of school kids around.
Hanger one is the main part of the museum. It’s kind of an overview of the RAF over a hundred years (yeah, the exhibit was designed in 2018). Rather than maybe splitting it up by decade or by conflict, the exhibit is split up by purpose. You have a bombers section, a sea section, a ground section, etc. It was a little difficult to follow, there was no set path through the area, it was more like just a big room with stuff dotted around.
There was one section that had artifacts from 1918 to 2018, including dolls, medals, leaflets. But they didn’t really have individual labels on them so a lot of the things I didn’t know what I was looking at.
The main draw of the room, and of the museum as a whole, were the airplanes. And a few boats and a helicopter. These were cool, of course, and the information panels gave a lot of information about the vehicle themselves. But I would have loved some more context.
You eventually leave the room through a sort of “future of the RAF” tunnel, which asked questions about what war in the future might look like. It also had some interactive games which were cool but I couldn’t get the hang of them. Also for some reason one of them asked for a fingerprint to start. You could opt to just press a button but it felt weird that this was even an option.
After the tunnel, you go into an area where the gift shop, restaurant, and exit are clearly marked. However, this is only the beginning of the museum. I’d looked online about what there was to see so knew there was more to it than this, but the other hangers weren’t obviously indicated and there were no free maps (you had to pay for the guide), so I can understand some people maybe not seeing the rest of the museum which would suck.
So hanger two was probably my favourite part of the museum. It was on the First World War. Yes, there were more planes, but there were also lots of artifacts that were not planes. There were posters from the era that highlighted the differences between British and German planes, uniforms that various personnel would wear, rations, maps on playing cards that would have been carried by prisoners of war. There was even a letter written by King George VI on November 11th. It was really interesting and educational.
I would have loved this sort of thing for the other conflicts. I felt like I learned more about what the RAF were actually doing in this war rather than just what planes there were.
Then we go to hangers three, four and five which are all attached.
It’s just lots of planes. Planes from the interwar period, planes from WW2, planes from the Cold War. Each plane had an information panel but I didn’t feel like there was much context to them.
Now, this might be on me. Perhaps, if I had stood and read every information panel everything would have been laid out. However, I could not, for reasons I will get to in the accessibility section.
This is going to sound stupid in a review about the RAF museum but other than planes, there wasn’t much to see.
Towards the back of the hangers, there was a small space where a two minute video sharing some testimonies about the bombing of German cities was shown alongside photos. It then asks you questions like “do you think we should have done this? Could the war have ended without this?”.
These were some really thought provoking questions, I think especially in today’s age. Today, things like the bombing of Dresden would probably be considered a war crime (although the video focused on the bombing of Berlin). We see on the news civilian buildings being destroyed as at best collateral during attacks on "legitimate military targets”.
It’s easy to go “Germany in WW2 bad, therefore bombing their cities good” but was it? Good, I mean (I’m not arguing Germany in WW2 wasn’t bad). I’m not a historian and I can’t answer that question with any authority. But I do come from a city that was scarred by bombing during the Second World War, where every year we’d go on school trips to our bombed out Cathedral or to the transport museum with a Blitz simulation so I spent a good deal of my childhood being told to imagine what it was like.
Anyway, all this is to say, that’s a really good question. But there is no context that would allow anyone without outside knowledge to provide any decent answer. It’s a two minute video of text on screen and photos of bombed out houses in a corner of a hanger filled with cool planes. And you can see, in the responses pegged to a wall, that the people actually attending the museum weren’t thinking about this too deeply. The answers were all entirely from children who were just like “the planes are really cool, I like the theme”. Because school trips make up a large portion of the visitors here (I passed like three groups during my journey). I’m not saying primary school kids can’t think about these things (again, I was going to the Blitz simulation as a seven year old) but this place did not give them anything really that encourages them to think about the subject.
There was another small section in the other back corner that showed the ruined remains of a few planes and memorials to prisoners of war and pilots lost during conflicts. Maybe it would have brought the mood down a little from “wow cool planes” but I would have really liked this sort of thing more scattered throughout the exhibit. It’s cool we’ve got all these planes from WW2 or the interwar period or whatever. But I think it’s important to remember that a lot of the planes that were sent out did not come back looking as shiny as they do here. A lot didn’t come back at all.
Also they could give you all the information on the different planes in the world, but once you’ve seen five planes, unless you’re really into planes, you’ve seen them all. Some were really big. Some were Nazi planes. One had Donald Duck on it. I’m sure they were all unique, but not for most people.
Accessibility
Everyone’s favourite part of the review: could you sit down?
There were maybe a half dozen benches scattered throughout the museum. There was nowhere where you could really sit and learn, other than those weird games and the two minute video. They were there for rest stops, but if you wanted to read the hundreds of information panels, you had to be standing. There were even some parts in the first two hangers where you could listen to interviews, but they didn’t have chairs nearby.
I’m not saying the lack of seating was why my shoulder frigging ached by the end of the day, but it did ache and the two might be connected.
The website says all upper levels are wheelchair accessible, but in hanger four there is an art gallery on the first floor (second for Americans) and I didn’t see an elevator anywhere. Maybe there was one hidden away, but it was nowhere that I could see. I did see elevators in other parts of the museum, so it may just have been I didn’t look hard enough (in case it wasn’t clear, hangers one and two are separate buildings, three four and five are all one).
There were large print booklets for each hanger, but for the most part the information panels didn’t have braille translations, which sucks. Some even had little models of the planes you could touch to get an idea of what they looked like if you couldn’t see, so this was really lacking.
In the women’s bathroom there was a free tampon and sanitary towel dispenser. I can’t say whether there was one in the men’s.
Overall, an interesting enough day out, especially if you really, really like planes. But bring your own chair if you need to sit down.
