North Weald's Fighter Meet 1989

It wasn’t quite Britain’s original warbird airshow — that honour belonged to West Malling’s Great Warbirds Air Display — but the Fighter Meet at North Weald was up there in the vanguard.

As the UK’s historic aircraft population grew through the second half of the 1980s, so the event at the former Fighter Command station in Essex reflected this expansion, doing so in its own unique style. Pyrotechnic-laden set-pieces and mass formations were very much the order of the day, filling the skies with the sort of action that was still pretty unfamiliar on these shores.

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