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Tethered

A long time ago before I even picked up a camera my big interest were aircraft. It was sparked by the comings and goings of the local aerodrome White Waltham, about a 15 minute bike ride from my home. There on long summer days and in a huge uninterrupted sky I’d watch the comings and goings of light aircraft but be overawed in those days by one one in particular. It was a silver DC-3 Dakota that would lumber along the grass runway and take flight with a guttural moan and almost relief. With its perfect uncomplicated, sophisticated smooth lines of 1930’s America was a complete change from the usual single engined light aircraft buzzing around. It was owned by a aerial mapping company based at the airfield for surveying, it now sits in the French Pyrenees in a museum. At some point I stopped going to the airfield — other stuff got in the way like cameras and music but the fascination for aircraft, flight and airfields never left.

I’d never pointed my lens at aircraft professionally or otherwise though, but one day I found myself waiting at another airfield, wandering aimlessly amongst the huts and sheds when I came across an engineless and seemingly abandoned Hawker Hunter jet. These aircraft was once part of our cold war defense in the 1960's, and yet here it was - alone staring into a sky that it once flew in but now would never inhabit again. It was for all intense and purposes waiting and decomposing and it was this that visually interested me. Walking round it I became aware that in essence it’s story was in the details - its dents, rust and scuffs of decay and the markings and paint of its life was all there.

I then sought out other aircraft like this. Their stories are all the same though — once cherished and loved by their pilots and engineers, they now wait in forgotten corners of airfields to be broken up or be reclaimed by weeds and plants. And whether its a B17 bomber from WW2 in a scrap yard or the enormous navy Gannet in-between sheds on an airfield their short eventful life in service seems may worlds away from where they are now. So that’s now where they remain — tethered and crippled through age and modernisation to wait an uncertain future.

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