Something happened at Ragley Hall two years ago that I have not managed to fully dismiss. I was standing near the treeline at the estate’s eastern end when a Spitfire came over. It was low enough that I heard the rivet pattern against the airflow before I heard the Merlin. Nobody around me seemed to register it. They were watching a stage act.
That image has stayed with me as the most accurate description of what the Midlands Air Festival actually is. It is a serious flying display running inside a music and food festival, and the two things coexist without apology. The aviation crowd is there, reading the programme and counting the contrails. The festival crowd is also there, and they are not the same people, and that is fine.
The show runs this weekend at Ragley Hall, May 29 to 31, and it falls on a Bank Holiday that has become unexpectedly loaded. The English Riviera Airshow is running in Devon simultaneously, and across the Atlantic the Memorial Day Weekend circuit is in full operation. RIAT 2026 is not running, and the fallout from that cancellation is still working its way through the circuit. This weekend matters more than it would in a normal year, and I am not sure the Midlands Air Festival knows it yet.
What I expected from my first visit to Ragley Hall was a diluted version of a proper airshow. I expected the kind of thing organised by people who wanted the atmosphere without the operational seriousness. What I found was a display programme that took sequencing and variety more seriously than events held at actual aerodromes. That surprised me enough that I stayed later than planned.
The estate setting at Ragley Hall changes the spectator experience in ways that are not obvious until you are inside them. There is no hard crowd line, no single viewing strip, and the aircraft are working against a landscape rather than a runway. A Typhoon pass over formal English parkland produces a different kind of visual violence than the same pass over an airfield apron. I mean that as an observation, not a complaint.
What the festival model gives the aviation content at Ragley Hall is a different kind of first-time spectator. Someone who came for a band on Saturday afternoon and stays to watch the aerobatics is experiencing display flying differently from someone who drove three hours to see it. I do not know whether that person becomes a regular at Fairford in five years’ time. I do know that every serious airshow culture needs new people, and most established shows are not finding them.
The criticism most commonly levelled at the Midlands Air Festival by people on the circuit is that it is not a proper airshow. What they mean, if you press them, is that it does not conform to the template established by events like Fairford and Yeovilton. That template was built around military airfields, military programming, and a crowd that already knows what it is looking at. The Midlands Air Festival is doing something different, and the circuit’s reluctance to credit it properly reflects more about the circuit than the show.
British airshow culture has been contracting for years, and the honest conversation about why is rarely held in public. The CAA regulatory environment after Shoreham changed the cost structure of display flying in ways that hit smaller events hardest. Several events that might have grown into serious alternatives simply stopped existing, and no one made an announcement. The Midlands Air Festival is still here and still growing, and that matters.
The RIAT cancellation this year has left a gap in the British airshow calendar that nothing else is large enough to fill. What it has done is redistribute attention across the events that are running, and some of those events are not used to the scrutiny. The Midlands Air Festival is running this weekend with what I understand to be a strong programme and a format that works. The fact that it is not at an aerodrome is not a disqualification from being worth your time.
I will not be at Ragley Hall this weekend, which I regret more than I expected to. I will be at Redhill, watching something smaller and less publicised, which is also the point. The British airshow circuit is not one thing. It is many things at different scales, and the ones that survive at the margins earn attention.
The Midlands Air Festival has earned more than it is currently getting.
Alex Bradley is a UK-based aviation writer and airshow circuit regular who has spent years attending displays from RIAT at Fairford and the Biggin Hill Festival of Flight to small fly-ins that drew two hundred people and a hot dog van, and values both for entirely different reasons.
He is not a pilot. He is not a PR man for the aviation industry. He is the person in the crowd who has been coming long enough to notice when something has quietly changed, when an organiser is papering over a problem, and when a display is genuinely worth the drive.
His writing on Redhill Airshow covers the British airshow circuit, safety, display team politics, CAA regulations, and the quiet contraction of grass airfield culture that nobody in the industry wants to discuss plainly.
He has stood at Redhill Aerodrome in every kind of English summer weather, watched Tiger Moths bank low over Surrey farmland, and carries strong opinions about what this country is slowly losing one cancelled event at a time.
