Well, you’re entitled to prefer grounded warbirds but that “growing mass of aviation enthusiasts” is still a minority given the fact that more people show go to airshows than to aviation museums.

The global public should be educated to the fact that if you keep flying a plane, eventually it will crash. It’s just a statistical reality.

So is driving a car or a boat/riding a horse/walking on the sidewalk/taking an elevator… All of these activities will end in tragedy at some point. Just keep doing them and you will crash the car/sink the boat/break your neck falling off the horse/slip on ice or oil and crack your skull/fall to your death trapped in the elevator. These are also statistical realities, and mean nothing.

To say, “If it’s a plane it should fly, is like saying you can’t appreciate a Guillotine unless it’s chopping off heads.”

This comparison seems pretty pointless as it isn’t necessary to kill people to appreciate warbirds and classic aircraft. Oh, and by the way: I’m sure a very clever chap could come up with a way to demonstrate how a guillotine works without actually having to chop a head off, too. He’d have to be quite brilliant, though.

Soon we will have no warbirds left to appreciate.

There are more and more restored warbirds, both airworthy and grounded. The number of crashes does not exceed that of rebuilds. Most “historical losses” come from lack of funds, interest, just being abandoned, etc.

Most of the restorations are done and paid for by people who want to “keep ’em flying”. For this very reason, we will soon have several more DH Mosquitoes on this planet.

But I guess the final word lays with these guys who build, own, maintain and fly the aircraft. If they want to fly them, it’s their right to do so and I can’t imagine why anyone would challenge this.

(In anticipation and refutation of the “They don’t own history” argument. Yes, they do, in a sense. If these people didn’t invest time, money and labour in their projects, there would be far fewer warbirds to “protect” or ground.)