RAF Museum Cosford

We visited the RAF Museum in Cosford over the school Summer holidays. It’s an interesting place to visit and has a lot of old aircraft that can be viewed.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see everything as one of the aircraft hangars was closed due to a flood.

The museum itself is free to enter, although you do need to pay for parking (this includes blue badge holders). There are plenty of places to sit and eat, if you’ve brought your own food, and there’s a cafe too. There’s also a small gift shop near the entrance to the museum.

This year the RAF is celebrating its centenary and, as part of the celebrations, guided tours of a Nimrod aircraft were being offered for £5 per person. We didn’t take the tour as it would have involved climbing up steps to the aircraft, but it was a fabulous opportunity to see inside a Nimrod.

The museum itself is very accessible to wheelchairs. In the hangar that displays aircraft used during the Cold War, there are lifts available to enable wheelchair users to get to different levels, or there is the option of going outside the hangar and walking down a sloped path to get to the lower levels of the hangar.

For visually impaired people, under normal circumstances you are not allowed to touch the wartime aircraft, due to the age of them. We were very lucky because while we were visiting John was given a touch tour of both a Spitfire and a Hurricane. The man who took John on the tour was very knowledgeable about both aircraft and also gave John the opportunity to touch some of the weapons that were used on these aircraft, including some of the ammunition that was used. This made the visit more meaningful for John.

The video of our visit is below. This was filmed before we got a new microphone, so some of the audio isn’t as good as it could be, particularly in the hangars.