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[/url]The last Avro Vulcan, one of the coolest warplanes of the Cold War era
, takes to the skies again this weekend. The plane, born of the days when the world seemed constantly under threat of nuclear war, was meticulously overhauled some time ago, but has flown intermittently because keeping it aloft is so expensive. The nonprofit Vulcan to the Sky Trust, which owns and operates the plane, is bringing it out again for the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
The Vulcan was the world’s first delta-wing bomber, a long-range aircraft developed in the 1950s to give Britain the ability to drop a nuke or two on Russia should we ever reach DefCon 2. It never came to that, of course, and the plane didn’t see combat until the early 1980s when the UK went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands."