Cover / Survivors / XH558

Spirit of Great Britain

Survivors · about 2 minutes

XH558 is the serial people mean when they say they saw "the Vulcan". She was the first B.2 delivered to the RAF, in 1960, and among the last to leave. After the bomber force died she displayed with the RAF Vulcan Display Flight until 1992, then spent years as a very large, very expensive problem sitting at Bruntingthorpe. A charitable restoration — the Vulcan to the Sky project, later a Trust — put her back in the air in 2007. Display seasons from 2008 to 2015 made her, briefly, the only flying Vulcan on Earth. If you have a memory of a howl over a hedge in those years, that was her. The others were already museum pieces.

The last flight was 28 October 2015. Not a lack of love: Olympus engines, spares, and the cost of keeping a 1960s bomber honest without a military supply chain. A Trust can raise a crowd. It cannot manufacture turbine discs that no longer exist at a price a charity can pay. She lives with the Vulcan to the Sky Trust at Doncaster Sheffield, on the old Finningley site. She does not fly. She still has the only celebrity the type really possesses. Engine runs and open days happen when engineering and money allow. This journal will not pretend a ground-running afternoon is a display season. It is still more Vulcan than a photograph.

If you are planning a visit, check the Trust's own notices, not a blog from 2014. Serials do not move often; opening arrangements do. For the two B.2s that still roll under their own power, The ones that still move. For a Saturday bias when nothing is running, A Saturday under the wing. XH558's afterlife is the reason a lot of us still argue about this aeroplane in the present tense. That is a gift and a distortion. The force was bigger than one serial. The crowd is not.