I was 80 years late at the airport. 

What a poignant video! The reverence and respect is palpable. It's fitting that the memorial should be so private, yet obviously carefully attended to. Better than a tourist trap full of selfie-taking gawkers. Hopefully estate developers never get access to this site.

Great video M7! Let me take a moment to honor a hero. My father served in the USMC for 36yrs starting in 1950 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He and the people buried around him deserve to have their service and sacrifice remembered. Grace & Peace.

It seems to me that the airpot authorities finaly did manage to camouflage the airfield propperly. Todays missions are so secret that even standing on the airfield, one does not notice them at all. (Great to see the attention for those hero's from WW II. We sould not forget.)

I’m on the west coast of Canada and in three hours I’ll be standing at my local cenotaph, paying my respects. This video is a perfect opportunity to remember the real people who gave so much. In the Armies, Navies and Air Forces. Thank you for this.

These small out of the way musuems and exhibits can be underwhelming. Yet simultaneously intimate as well. A good little showcase of such a place. Important things happened there, we are in their debt.

That memorial building is something else. Mad respect to all those heroes.

Nice to see Augie pick up the fine English tradition of wandering the countryside.

I could just feel the chill in the air from the video. I miss that kind of weather. It is really sad to see how "unloved" the Memorial is. Hopefully this will inspire someone to look into maintaining the building and the Memorial's memorabilia. Looks like it needs some TLC, and some signage to lead interested people to its location. Thank you for sharing this.

Fascinating! If you're gonna start poking around the area (on camera or not), there was an old SeaBee in the long grass at Elstree aerodrome last time I was there (pre covid), and if you're ever passing Denham (home of Martin Baker) , there's no visible history but a Piaggio P180 comes through regularly and you can sit at the end of the runway 😉

Beautiful memorial. Lysander also beautiful aircraft.

Very cool video Fascinating how it was such a huge hub of activity and now quietly forgotten.

Still remembered, lest we forget. Unfortunately history repeats itself, it has to because know one listens😢 ( Spike Milligan)

Great episode, thank you!

Amazing something still is left... Very interesting... Thanks for sharing your experience!

Thank you for taking time and showing us this remote memorial. Their sacrifices should never be forgotten !

Very cool video. I hope you get views and do more. There is a lot of avaiton history in the 🇬🇧

Astounding. I'd love to see more of this sort of thing. Living in the U.S., you can overfly much of the county and see the typical triangular runway layouts of what were USAAC training fields from WWII. Many are still active airports, with one or two of the runways in service, while lots more are just ghosts that made their imprint on the land. The active airports usually have a history wall of sorts, similar to this video, so you can learn. The fact that so many were built 80+ years ago is one reason why light aircraft flying has been historically popular and accessible to people of average means in North America. Unfortunately, this is changing too.

I was never huge into making models as a kid, but the first airfix model I ever made was a Westland Lysander. They mentioned Halifax but the Lysander was commonly used to drop agents.

Some years ago I read Wing Commander John Nesbitt-Dufort's book Black Lysander about his exploits with one of the squadrons which flew these mission. One mission I remember was when they were dropping an agent into France. The agent exited through the hatch in the floor but as his chute opened it snagged on the tailwheel of the converted bomber. The agent struggled to get free but something went wrong and the chute slowly strangled him to death. Because of his position in the aircraft all of this was watched by the tail gunner who was powerless to help and because he was the tailgunner he could not move from that position but had to sit with the body of the dead agent hanging out behind them. Once it was deemed safe to do so Nesbitt-Dufort told the tailgunner to move forward into the aircraft.

Da italiano in UK, concordo pienamente sulla differenza tra le 2 memorie storiche!

My dad took a Lysander for a spin during the war according to his log book but it doesn't say where or why.

My father flew Lysanders on SOE operations in the early part of WW2 before moving on to Bomber Command.

Doing this sistematically could be a really nice "excuse" to start doing some serious trekking. We do something really similar with our local CAI here in central italy... And hey.. you know what? You start searching for an old munition cave on a mountain, and by the time you realize its lunchtime already and time to eat your your pork super-stuffed Italian-style sandwich, you realized you roamed around for 18km in the countryside. Repeat this for a year or two, and you ll learn to know (and truly love) the place where you live (something that today is not at all obvious in our generalized digital self-induced autism), aaaand you ll end up doing that gym, and slow but steady physical activity which we never have time to do during the week. To me? it was a revelation! Enjoy! :)

Worth watching. Thank you.

Thanks and take care. Enjoyed the video very much.

I enjoy that video, I would love to see you tour air museum

Very touching video... The French ace Pierre Clostermann says that in 1945, when he commanded a squadron of TempestV, saw a pilot full of decorations arrive in his office.. After a quick look at the documents, Clostermann realized that this man was a Lysanders pilot, who had flown 120 round trips to France... And he thought: "I think he came here to relax"....

Great video!

Good video. Thanks

Super video (msg from France)

so you speak of 138 and 161 squadron ops, who transferred agents of the Special Operations Executive between England and France. Actually they found Tempsford rather too far north, and would go to Tangmere in the week before and after every moon period. Tempsford had that one sealed service apron and three runways which they most certainly used for take-off, but the Lysander was just as at home on the grass field adjacent to the east. I think the building you went into was north of a crossroad, which contained an Inn, might have been known as the Wheatsheaf, and a sawmill. Nearer Tangmere, you might also have looked for Tangmere Cottage, which was the nerve centre for operations, and housed both pilots and passengers before take off. Principal pilot for A flight was Hugh Verity, B flight was another chap, Bob Hodges, and the example Lysander at Shuttleworth is just a representative aircraft presentation.

Tempelhof is basically the same

THAT4S A LYSANDER? NICE BIRD

Respects

Better late than never. Nice to see you out and about. God bless all who stand against Tirrany. Everyone stands alone in the end, what did your life mean? I'd like to think all the sweat blood and treasure was worth all this chaos of living in a free world. If I am honest authoritarians probably have the same troubles. They are not as apt to post about it.

Amazing find. Sometimes I do wish we would forget. Then we wouldn’t have wasteful wars like Ukraine, Iraq, Syria…😢

That's what England is... a glorious past... hell even US is starting to look like one so... yeah... what a sad world to grow old in...

Impossibile in Italia che tristezza!

👍👍

my dad have gone there

:)

Only people who weren't there want to remember. People who have had to experience such terrible things don't want to have or keep memories of them. Such things are also unsuitable for enlightenment because it was always only politicians who started wars and ran them. People are forcibly recruited while politicians live in the palace and then go into exile after the war. This respect for wars and the like is demonstrated to us by the media and the government, for example. I don't feel gratitude for the veterans, I feel bad for them and understand if they don't want to remember this terrible time in their lives. A memorial or an old airfield with old stuff won't stop politicians from starting wars. Politicians remember wars differently. They want to remember because they got a lot of money at that time or other things. This also applies to industrialists.