I always had a soft spot for the old Canberra. It broke many records in the first few years & is a nice looking bird depite all the knobs & bumps it acquired doing different jobs.

One little fact that not many will know is that most types of Canberra are fitted with 7 door locks. These are a pressurised version of the type first used on the lower hatch on the Bristol Beaufighter. The design had to be both strong & foolproof as the rear crew member stood on this hatch during flight. They were also fitted to various aircraft like the DH Dove, Heron & DH.106 Comet among others. Don't tell anyone but I still have a set of keys that would allow me to enter any one of these aircraft.

I know this as I was the last person responsible for their manufacture before production was reluctantly stopped. I met the man who designed these ingenious locks when my company first took over the contract. We even supplied a couple for the pressurised gondola on a high altitude balloon that was going for some record or other.

PS. On the rare occasion I spot a Canberra flying over I can proudly say: "Ah, there goes another 7 of my door locks".

RAF Wyton is (was?) the place to be. When I was up there as an Air Cadet (back in the 80's) they had the PRs working hard (we even got to do work in the photographic interpretation section, I learnt some amazing things!)
Some A-10s were stuck with us as they were having their runway done up, and they were showing off doing close pairs flying an aerobatics and trying to wind-up the RAF pilots. So two Canberras took off and promptly proved they could do anything the A-10 guys could, with half the spacing. There were a lot of USAF pilots paying for beer that night

Ozzy