You see it before you hear it. Heading toward the airfield under watery autumn sun, it appears through a haze, growing in size but, head-on at least, still silent. Then it banks, and the giant, bat-shaped Avro Vulcan bomber sweeps past with a huge roar. When it powers into a turn, the Vulcan’s howl sounds like a massive ream of velvet being ripped from end-to-end.

Several thousand people are assembled at the Heritage Motor Centre in Warwickshire, here to see one of the last flying displays of a Cold War bomber brought back to unlikely life. Even at a fair distance away – aircraft like the Vulcan aren’t allowed to fly directly over crowds at public displays for safety reasons – its size is staggering.

Avro Vulcan XH558, to give this aircraft its proper title, is the very last of the 136 Vulcans built still able to take to the air; most of its compatriots ended up going to the scrapyard. Vulcans entered service as nuclear-armed bombers in the 1950s, an atomic deterrent on duty every hour of every day. They were retired in the 1980s after performing their only ‘wartime’ mission on epic flights into the South Atlantic during the Falklands conflict.