Ah, the Hawker Hunter! September 1953, the Farnborough Air Show: that huge double drumbeat of a sonic boom that you could feel inside and even through the soles of your feet; then, looking down the runway, you could see a tiny red dot growing bigger and bigger in a total and eerie silence until SLAM - the blood-red Hunter prototype, WB188, went by fifty feet off the tarmac at a hairsbreadth below the speed of sound, before pulling up into a vertical climb for the rest of its display. I was eight years old, and I just hope everybody has a childhood memory even half as good as that one.