Leisure Flying in Essex In addition to Stansted Airport and several commercial airfields, Essex is also the home of many flying clubs. Leisure flying is a fast growing sport and many clubs also teach aerobatics in addition to coaching members for their private pilot’s licence. Thriving clubs exist in Southend, Clacton, Earls Colne, Stebbing, Wormingford, North Weald and elsewhere and flying has never enjoyed such popularity. Some clubs are located at old World War 2 airfields, a reminder of the history of flight in Essex, whereas others are linked to busy commercial airfields. Yet flying for leisure is a relatively new activity. Until the foreign travel boom of the 1960s few people had flown, let alone taken the controls of a small plane. In the 1930s, some seventy years ago, many Essex people had never been close to a plane and when Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus visited an airfield near Brentwood, a huge crowd turned out to watch in wonder as the pilots in their biplanes performed daring aerobatic feats. This section of Essex Life in Archive Film takes a look at a 1932 film of Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus at Brentwood and also draws on the experiences of a group of students from Northwick Park Junior School when they visited a flying club in Southend to learn how things have changed over a period of seventy years in the world of aviation.