Our second newsletter is out.
Airside 2 – 2026 is the Trust’s own account of this year, written by our Chief Trustee: twelve years of taking the Great War in the air into classrooms, twenty-five day-long school visits in the academic year just ended, and four poem drops over northern France in July.
Lochnagar, on the morning of the 110th commemoration of the Somme, where the rocket is still fired and the whistles still blown. Thiepval, where more than 72,000 men have no grave but their names on the pillars. Le Quesnoy, taken with a single ladder seven days before the Armistice and without a bombardment, because the town was still full of people. And Le Hamel, where the aeroplanes flew low to cover the sound of the tanks moving up to the start line — and where we let the poems go at that same moment.
Over 7,000 children have now written poems carried by the Poetry Plane. More than 2,000 of them this year alone, from over fifty schools in twenty-seven countries — Tasmania to Pennsylvania, Invercargill to Chelmsford.
Read Airside 2 – 2026. It is free, and there is nothing to sign up to.
