Peter,
Excellent pictures and you lucky, lucky chap to have been there. Sadly, work kept me incarcerated in London, fuming over the internet gateway on our system, which won't allow video streams from news sites, youtube and the like, so we had to make do with the continual updates that were pouring into pprune which was better than nothing, but caught it on the news later. With the best of weather to do her air test, she looked resplendent on the ground and glorious in the air.
As for scrap iron and decibel levels, a heck of a lot of redundant kit has been stripped out (radar, ecm, all the old weapons, nav kit, miles of wiring etc etc) - from talking to her engineers a couple of weeks ago, I know thay have had to do plenty of weighing and c of g calculations and revisions during the restoration. I'm not sure what fuel load she had on board, but I wouldn't imagine that it was a full load for a 30min trip and, with Bruntingthorpe's 10,000 foot runway and her relatively low wing loading, the crew wouldn't have needed to bend the throttle stops to get her in the air, so they were probably treating the old girl gently - indeed, she may even have surprised them with how sprightly she was off the stops!
MG Mark
