No Room For Vertigo: How To Clean A Hanging Plane

How do you clean an old aircraft that's suspended above the ground?

RAF Cosford's answer is to round up those with a good head for heights, and get them dangling from the ceiling on ropes once a year.

According to Bruce Kemp, this can be nerve-wracking at first, but it gets easier with practice:

"The more you carry out work... at height, the more it starts to become a normal thing."

It might seem normal to those who do the cleaning, but for one visitor to RAF Cosford, Matt Fricker, it's an impressive display:

"[The Lightning] is one [aircraft] I used to work on when I was in the Air Force, and I was just rather amazed by the chap abseiling up the side of it".

It takes about a week to clean all eight of the hanging aircraft at Cosford, but then time flies when you're having fun.

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