AIRBOURNE EASTBOURNE

In mid-August every year, our summer home, Eastbourne in East Sussex, England, hosts a fabulous Air Show with a wide variety of planes, present and past. It starts on Thursday and ends Sunday evening, this Eastbourne Airbourne, as it is officially known. On the Grand Parade, the main drag on the English Channel, which is famous for its Carpet Gardens of an infinite variety of flowers in an infinite range of colors arranged in geometric patterns, vendors set up stands in a nearby park area, representing a range of services from snack foods to t-shirts to toys to pennants to displays by the Royal Air Force, the R.A.F, with personnel to answer your questions.

One year the city fathers or Eastbourne Council, as it is known, really let greed get the best of them and decided to charge an attendance fee for those in this central area. DUH! How do you charge for air space or people looking up? It almost ruined the show. Everyone simply went elsewhere to view the show, and the vendors got really pissed off as their business fell off precipitiously because no one showed up! A couple of councilors who were up for election the next year got their butts whipped by indignant Eastbourners. The council did not try that ingenious “money maker” again.

Everyone in Eastbourne can look up in their own backyard (or garden, as it is known here) in the late morning or afternoon and hear the drone of propeller planes or helicopters or sonic booms of the jets. One year, in 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of WW II, I was sitting in our garden one early afternoon when I heard the roar of multi-engines and looked up to see, descending over our house, a Spitfire, a P-51 Mustang and a B-24 Liberator bomber---shades of 1944-45! I was excited since my brother was Navigator on a B-24 in Italy, and I still get my kicks by the sight and sound of WW II planes.

Sometimes, when we were younger, we would climb up one of the steep downs (small mountains) and watch from the plateaus on top of the downs. Other times, including this year on Saturday, we would join my wife’s sister and husband, who live in Eastbourne, and view the air show from one of the rocky beaches where you could get an excellent prospect of the show.

Today, Sunday, we walked down to Helen’s Park, a half mile gentle walk downhill from our house. Helen’s Park has a beautiful expanse of green, plenty of park benches, a putt-putt eighteen hole golf course, children’s play area and a special section, surrounded by shrubs where local teams can bowl on the lawn, wearing their all-white outfits. We had a wonderful view of the air show from there. It is an idyllic setting, overlooking the English Channel, which today was in full glory, its colors ranging from aquamarine to deep royal blue, dotted by an armada of sail and power boats with an unrestricted view of the show. The park, as you would expect was loaded with families, filling the grass and benches. It was a Sunday summer scene the world over with the added benefit of a constantly changing air shows, ranging from sleek jets testing the limits of the viewing sky to old bi-planes turning on the smoke while they do barrel loops and figure eights.

The highlight each day is a spectacular display of precision flying and acrobatics by The Red Arrows, the RAF’s pride and joy, their equivalent of our Blue Angels. They give you your money’s worth in a show of forty-five minutes, including streaming red, white and blue smoke in arcs, circles and a final heart, after which they flip over in a victory salute and head back to base in Sussex.

Ah yes, summer time---and the livin’ is easy. And the Eastbourne Airbourne is real easy watchin'.