Avro Vulcan Takes Final Flight

Pia Bergqvist

Tuesday, November 03, 2015 at 09:42 PM ET

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Vulcan's final flight

Key Takeaways:

The Avro Vulcan XH558, the last airworthy example of the iconic British bomber, completed its final flight on October 28, marking the end of its 8-year "Farewell to Flight" season.
The decision to retire the aircraft was made due to increasing difficulty in identifying potential maintenance failures and a very limited number of experts capable of working on it.
Though it will no longer fly, XH558 will remain accessible to the public at Robin Hood Doncaster Sheffield Airport as part of a display and educational center, with occasional ground runs.

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The Avro Vulcan XH558, a British bomber with a beautiful delta profile and an unmistakable howling sound, has landed for the last time, concluding its “Farewell to Flight” season. The charitable organization Vulcan to the Sky Trust has operated the last of the breed, named The Spirit of Great Britain, for the past eight years, providing the public with many flight displays of the exciting airplane.

The Avro Vulcan was designed in the late 1940s and retired from the Royal Air Force in 1984. XH558 returned to the skies again in 2007 and flew 228 flights and 346 hours, much to the thrill of millions of airshow spectators.