It's a happy day for airshow-visiting 'plane geeks of the highest order - possibly the best loved weapon of mass destruction, the Avro Vulcan cold war bomber, has finally returned to the skies!

The Vulcan was once the sharp end of Britain's cold war nuclear deterrent, a long range bomber commissioned by the RAF in the fifties to ferry friendly hydrogen bombs around. Fortunately it was never called upon to drop any of its atomic passengers, although it did play a successful part as a conventional bomber in the Falklands conflict, ironically just a year or two before it was decommissioned in the early eighties. It's long been admired by aircraft fans for its amazing design, and the awe inspiring sight of it's near-vertical climb after take-off - not to mention the gut-trembling sound of its four Olympus engines - and I remember it fondly from various airshows it starred in during the late eighties/early nineties - but sadly that came to an end when the last remaining flying examples were all grounded due to their age, and the immense cost of maintaining them.

For the last fourteen years no Vulcans have flown, and the majority have either been mothballed in museums or scrapped, but happily - with the support of a lot of mug, bookmark, and pen-buying fans like me - the charitable Vulcan to the Sky organisation has spent the last eight years restoring Vulcan XH-558 to air-worthiness, in a £6.5m project. Today is the day that it all came good, as the first of three test flights passed off without a hitch. Congratulations to the clever people at the The Vulcan Operating Company (who I'm sure are still open to more donations btw), and there's more on the beeb here.