Propelled to meet

This is a shot of the Gloster Gamecock's propellor taken at the Jet Age museum at Gloucester, during today's Gloucester Blipmeet, organised by djrose007 (David Rose).  It was the RAF's last wooden fighter plane.  

My brother in law Incredibish and I journeyed up together to meet the 9 other blippers attending.  As I am sure is inevitable at all blipmeets, we started with a round of introductions over teas and coffees.  In the case of Blip this is of course complicated by the fact that most people's Blip name is not their real name.  I seem to be quite a notable exception in that respect!  With two sets of names to try to remember, we then got to explore the museum in the company of the other blippers:

djrose007 
Incredibish 
Hildasrose - and Rob
Thingsbeautiful 
SHH
ABeaglePackDad 
HelenJG 
MPJG 
CleanSteve 
Woodpeckers 
Woofcity

There are (or will be) some group photos taken by others.  I was using a 16mm lens and where blippers were in view at the edges of shots the distortion is not complementary to the subject, so I haven't kept any.  I did take a group shot with the camera using a remote release, but stupidly had forgotten that I had been shooting indoors in manual mode just a few minutes before, and assumed that the camera was in aperture priority mode; so my group shot is hopelessly over exposed.  Fortunately I know that Dave has a shot and I'm pretty sure that Incredibish has one too. 

If you are at all interested in the history of flight, the museum is well worth a  visit.  We got to sit in various cockpits, including that of the Vulcan bomber and the Trident (the first passenger jet to have an automatic landing system).  The Vulcan is terribly cramped and there are banks and banks of instruments in front of you.  Its one of the few occasions where being a relatively small chap is a positive advantage :-)

Dave is a sponsor of the museum and my first extra is specially for him - its the sponsor's wall, if you look carefully, you can see his section.  

My second extra is a shot of a Gloster Meteor, awaiting refurbishment, which was shot outside in the sunshine a bit later on.  

For anyone that is interested, the other shots taken today are in this Flickr album 

After the group photo, Mark and I grabbed a quick cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, and as a result while we managed to say good-bye to some, we didn't get to say good-bye to all.  In particular we didn't get to say thank you properly to Dave for organising this very entertaining event - so if you are reading this Mr Rose, many thanks!