London Trip 5 - IWM Duxford

On the way to the next room you pass through a corridor with a Polaris Missile.

Helpfully marked inert, this missile and others liked it formed the underwater component of the UK's nuclear deterrent from 1968 to 1996.  Kinda neat to see one in person.

The next room had airplanes.  Lots of airplanes.

 We'll look at the jets first:

The Harrier:

The English Electric Lightning:

 With it's rather neat vertically stacked engine arrangement:

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The amazingly fast English Electric Canberra:

The Avro CF-100 Canuck:

The Sepecat Jaguar:

The Panavia Tornado:

An Avro Vulcan Bomber:

and a DeHavilland Comet, the first commercial jet airliner that began service with some significant flaws.  This one is a later model, the Comet 4:

 

There's also some interesting prototypes on display:

The British prototype TSR-2:

The prototype Concorde:

You could get into the Concorde and look around:

 

Narrower than your typical passenger jet, and this one has lots of test and monitoring equipment in that aircraft. There was even an escape tube to evacuate the aircraft in flight should the tests go wrong.

Those were just the jets in this airplane heaven of the first main display.