I particularly enjoyed getting a close-up look at an English Electric Lightning. Like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, the Lightning has features that are a bit odd or even offputting taken in isolation – the over-under engines, the beer-belly fuel-tank, the strange positioning of the missile hardpoints just below the cockpit, the big wide stupid chin and hamster cheeks, the over-wing drop tanks, the air intake around the nosecone, the weird lips - but the overall effect is stunning. The Lightning looks like the designer dropped a paper dart on the table and said “Tell you what. Let’s make one of those fly at Mach 2.”

As you might expect given the gap between visits, there were a number of changes and additions to the last time I was there. Getting to walk right under a Vulcan bomber was a highlight, and one that really brought home the sheer monstrous size of the thing. The fact that it even got off the ground boggles the mind, it’s quite literally bigger than the whole row of three terraced houses that we live on. Flying it must have been like trying to pilot a medium-sized Baptist church. Of doom.

My favourite addition was the brand new Milestones Of Flight hanger, though – a light, airy space filled with aircraft of varying degrees of historical significance. One of the first things you see as you enter the hall is an extremely cool juxtaposition – a Bleriot XI monoplane of the type used to make the first crossing of the English Channel and the RAF’s current state-of-the-art fighter.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Between the year 909 and the year 1009, technology advanced from the sword all the way to the slightly fancier sword. Between 1909 and 2009 we’ve gone from a machine that’s basically a big t-shirt wrapped around a couple of cheap photo-frames with some bicycle wheels lashed on the bottom and an engine that we’d laugh at if it were powering a scooter, to the Eurofighter Typhoon. We’ve gone from the Model T to the Bugatti Veyron. We’ve gone from candlestick phones and manual switchboards to the Internet. We’ve gone from TS Eliot to Dan Brown. We’ve gone from workhouses to child labour in the Far East. We’ve gone from cities choked with smog to impending global environmental cataclysm.

Sorry, sort’ve lost where I was going with that toward the end.

Still – crikey, Charlie. The acceleration of technological progress, the sheer pace at which humanity is churning out life-changing innovations staggers me. In less than a century, we’ve gone from 37 minutes to fly the Channel to less than a minute. What on Earth (or beyond) do you suppose we’re going to manage in the next hundred years?