Beneath the panes of Perspex in her floor, the daisy-strewn runway falls away as fast as 80 years of history. The Blenheim’s snout lifts skywards, her twin engines casting a heat haze behind the propellers’ silver blur. At 200mph, she throttles towards a patchwork of cumulus and sun, quiet, quick and deft. Inside she is bare of today’s technology. Her khaki flight deck contains pedals as delicate as a piano’s, a joystick, and a small black bank of antique instruments. I am perched in the navigator’s place on a circular seat the size of a dinner plate. Above me and...