Farnborough Air Show 1949 (1949)

"The greatest air show the world has yet seen" is how narrator Leslie Mitchell describes this and after ten minutes I could well believe him. A gathering of top brass from around the world gather at the British International airshow to see a great array of modern military and civilian aircraft, and with some excellent photography we are introduced to helicopters that really do look like giant metallic locusts; English Electric's "Canberra B1"; the enormous Avro "Shackleton" bomber; the De Havilland "Comet"; Vickers "Viscount"; the "Hermes 5" which can travel at 330mph for a distance of 2,000 miles; the "Apollo"; "Marathon 2"; some gentle acrobatics from a De Havilland "Venom" and some action from her twin-seated sister ship the "DH113". There are also some flypasts from the "Meteor" fighter; the Hawker "P1052" and then some sneak peaks at the experimental Avro 707 (just off the secret list, no less - so don't tell!); the huge great Short "Solent" and finally the biggest beast of all - the 120 ton "Brabazon", which does take it's own sweet time to get airborne. It's fascinating to see just how quickly post war aviation managed to capitalise on all the investment made during the early 1940s, with some of these craft really quite astonishing feats of engineering.