Aviation festival prepares for take-off

The third Orkney Aviation Festival starts today, Thursday, and will run until Sunday.

The launch at Kirkwall Town Hall tonight sees renowned aviation historian and artist Professor Dugald Cameron OBE, former head of the Glasgow School of Art, present the Loganair Lecture, From Pilcher to the Planets, the story of Scottish Aviation.

During the festival, his painting of two planes of Gandar Dower’s Allied Airways flying past the Old Man of Hoy will be on display at the Orcadian Bookshop.

At the King Street Halls in Kirkwall, Ian Brown, of the National Museum of Flight, will talk about the role of airships in Orkney, while local aviation enthusiast Robert Foden delivers a somewhat sideways look at some aviation mishaps in his talk, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Friday will also see the arrival at Kirkwall Airport of two visiting aircraft from the Britten Norman company, the designer and manufacturer of the Islander aircraft.

These planes are Britten Norman’s display plane, the Golden Islander, and the Defender — the military version of the Islander.

Both planes will be on display to the public at the airport between 10am and 2pm.

On Saturday evening, at the Birsay Hall, the Birsay Heritage Trust presents a talk by Commander David Hobbs MBE, who will compare and contrast the Second World War naval airfields of Twatt and Crail, as well as showing a film made at Royal Naval Air Station HMS Jackdaw (Crail), during World War II.

Until recently, this film — part of the Imperial War Museum collection — had been unidentified, but Commander Hobbs was able to verify the locations.

On Sunday night, at the King Street Halls, the festival ends with a film of the 1925 attempt to fly over the North Pole by Amundsen and Ellsworth, introduced by Robert Foden.