Sunderland International Airshow

Sunderland International Airshow is an annual airshow held near Roker Seafront in Sunderland or Seaburn beach Seafront. It is held over 2 days, normally the last weekend in July. Over both days the airshow attracts around 1,000,000 spectators. It is also tradition for the Royal Navy to have a warship off the coast, which is often used by the Black Cats as a base to shorten transit times. It is normally HMS Ocean, the adopted warship of Sunderland. However, in 2007, the amphibious assault ship HMS Albion made an appearance instead as HMS Ocean was busy with other commitments.

Affiliations

Durham Tees Valley Airport is used as a base for most of the flying displays, compared with previous use of Newcastle Airport, this is possibly because Tees Valley has fewer flights resulting in faster turnarounds for aircraft departing and arriving from the airshow.
Newcastle International Airport was used up until 2007, the only aircraft in the 2007 show to use Newcastle were the C-130K Hercules of the RAF Falcons Parachuting team, and the Eastern Airways BAe Jetstream 41 North East England Livery and the Red Arrows. The organisers stopped using this as the main airport because they have a tight flight schedule with many more low cost flights departing now then in previous years.

The Green Airshow

In 2007 Sunderland City Council teamed up with Gentoo and CarbonNeutral North East to reduce and off-set all the emissions caused by staging the two-day show.There was a Green Village with many environmental stalls.

Highlights

The show has many highlights that return every year including: [cite web
url = http://www.sunderland-airshow.com/display.asp
title = Flying Display]
*Red Arrows
*Eurofighter Typhoon
*Black Cats (Royal Navy)
*Merlin
*Harrier GR9 (Although due to military commitments, it was not there in 2007)
*The Blades
*F-16
*The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight
*The RAF Falcons

In 2007 a few new displays turned up including:
*Royal Marines Role Demo - 6 Assault Squadron
*RAF Chinook Display Team - Personnel from 18 and 27 Squadrons
*Eastern Airways BAe Jetstream 41 North East England Livery
*Catalina [http://www.caa.co.uk/application.aspx?catid=60&pagetype=65&appid=1&mode=detailnosummary&fullregmark=G-PBYA G-PBYA]

Gallery

References

External links

* [http://www.sunderland-airshow.com Official Website]
* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/wear/entertainment/sunderland_airshow/index.shtml BBC Wear's pictures and videos of previous Sunderland Airshows]
* [http://www.aircraftinaction.co.uk/2007/Sunderland.htm Review of the 2007 Airshow]