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RAF Musuem Cosford to Celebrate 30 years with Spitfire flypast

The Royal Air Force Museum Cosford will be celebrating its 30th Anniversary with an afternoon of events taking place on Friday 1st May 2009. Visitors are invited to join the festivities which will include a Spitfire Flypast scheduled for 12.35pm sharp (weather permitting). 

After a short interlude the Brass Quartet from the Royal Air Force College Band will give a concert in the Museum's Visitor Centre at 1pm; after which an official plaque will be unveiled in the presence of current and former members of Museum staff and volunteers, commemorating the anniversary and the Museum’s development over the last three decades. 

As part of the day’s celebrations visitors and guests will be able to view, in the Visitor Centre, a timeline which will note all the significant events of the Museum’s history since its foundation in 1979. To showcase the skilled preservation of aircraft that is so central to the Museum’s collection and its continued development one of the Museum’s first aircraft, the Bristol 188, and our most recent addition to the collection, the MH-53 Pave Low Helicopter, will be outside on display together near the Museum’s Neptune (weather permitting).

In 1974 RAF personnel opened the collection for public viewing on the first Sunday of the month from April until October.  The Royal Air Force Museum Cosford was born out of a collection of historic ground instructional airframes taken from RAF Cosford’s inventory. The Museum came into being when the Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum took over management of the collection from the RAF on 1st May 1979 and appointed a civilian Curator thus establishing the Cosford’s original Museum, the Aerospace Museum.

Phil Jones, Secretary of the Aerospace Museum Society says:

“I have been a member of the Society from the very beginning and have seen how the Museum has grown over time.  Now the Museum is open seven days a week, twelve months of the year has over 70 staff and over 70 aircraft”.