- Home
- Turnhouse
-
Elsewhere
- Prestwick >
- Renfrew
- East Fortune
- Scone, Perth
- Strathallan
-
RAF Leuchars
>
- RAF Leuchars 1960
- RAF Leuchars 1961
- RAF Leuchars 1962
- RAF Leuchars 1966
- RAF Leuchars 1967
- RAF Leuchars 1968
- RAF Leuchars 1974
- RAF Leuchars 1981
- RAF Leuchars 1982
- RAF Leuchars 1984
- RAF Leuchars 1985
- RAF Leuchars 1986
- RAF Leuchars 1987
- RAF Leuchars 1988
- RAF Leuchars 1990
- RAF Leuchars 1991
- RAF Leuchars 1993
- RAF Leuchars over the fence
- RNAS Abbotsinch >
- RNAS Lossiemouth >
- RAF Kinloss
- Rosyth
- Leith Docks
- London, Heathrow
- London, Gatwick, 1966
- Aircraft Carriers >
- Elsewhere >
- STV Interview
- Contact
This site contains photographs taken, mainly in the 1960s, of examples of aircraft that visited Scottish airports - primarily Turnhouse (Edinburgh), but also Renfrew (Glasgow), Prestwick, Scone (Perth), Leuchars, Abbotsinch and Lossiemouth - plus some taken elsewhere.
In 1960, I was a wee laddie of 14, with an Agfa Silette 35mm fixed-lens camera, who cycled regularly to Turnhouse to "watch the planes". It’s fortunate that the camera's lens had a fixed focal-length, otherwise I would have probably cropped the shots much more closely and lost a lot of the surrounding atmosphere. Even more fortunately, today, I still have all the negatives - which are standing up fairly well to the ravages of time. Over the years, I bought better and better cameras and kept taking photographs of aircraft.
If you are too young to have been around at the time (!) - please don't get the idea that these aircraft are representative of daily life - on the whole, they are the highlights, particularly the Turnhouse photographs. At Turnhouse, routinely, life was Air Experience/UAS Chipmunks, RAF Ansons, BEA Viscounts, Ferranti Flying Unit movements and the occasional Auster and Tiger Moth. That may sound OK now - as most of these types are virtually extinct, but they were fairly hum-drum then. Having said that, movements were dominated by piston types - that seemed to have a little more character than today's jets.
This site was first created in January 2003 and has been extensively extended since. Occasionally, I find more images worth adding.
I’d like to get round to captioning everything - but with around 1,500 images now on the site, it’s doubtful. I’ll see. It’s been a lot of scanning, but the alternative could possibly be that these little bits of (what are now becoming) history would be lost. So, I hope you enjoy what you see. Ah, the memories!
In April 2014, Scottish Television took an interest in my story. After a nice chat in a Glasgow Starbucks with their Lorna Piper, they published this on their website.
Colin Lourie, Edinburgh
For comprehensive histories of Edinburgh and Glasgow’s Airports, read Keith McCloskey's excellent books:
Edinburgh Airport - A History ISBN: 0 7524 3805 0
Glasgow’s Airports ISBN: 978 0 7524 5077 3
In 1960, I was a wee laddie of 14, with an Agfa Silette 35mm fixed-lens camera, who cycled regularly to Turnhouse to "watch the planes". It’s fortunate that the camera's lens had a fixed focal-length, otherwise I would have probably cropped the shots much more closely and lost a lot of the surrounding atmosphere. Even more fortunately, today, I still have all the negatives - which are standing up fairly well to the ravages of time. Over the years, I bought better and better cameras and kept taking photographs of aircraft.
If you are too young to have been around at the time (!) - please don't get the idea that these aircraft are representative of daily life - on the whole, they are the highlights, particularly the Turnhouse photographs. At Turnhouse, routinely, life was Air Experience/UAS Chipmunks, RAF Ansons, BEA Viscounts, Ferranti Flying Unit movements and the occasional Auster and Tiger Moth. That may sound OK now - as most of these types are virtually extinct, but they were fairly hum-drum then. Having said that, movements were dominated by piston types - that seemed to have a little more character than today's jets.
This site was first created in January 2003 and has been extensively extended since. Occasionally, I find more images worth adding.
I’d like to get round to captioning everything - but with around 1,500 images now on the site, it’s doubtful. I’ll see. It’s been a lot of scanning, but the alternative could possibly be that these little bits of (what are now becoming) history would be lost. So, I hope you enjoy what you see. Ah, the memories!
In April 2014, Scottish Television took an interest in my story. After a nice chat in a Glasgow Starbucks with their Lorna Piper, they published this on their website.
Colin Lourie, Edinburgh
For comprehensive histories of Edinburgh and Glasgow’s Airports, read Keith McCloskey's excellent books:
Edinburgh Airport - A History ISBN: 0 7524 3805 0
Glasgow’s Airports ISBN: 978 0 7524 5077 3
