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Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
🎥 England celebrate EURO 2025 triumph with London bus parade
The EURO 2025 champions are back home and celebrating with their fans. It's been a packed 48 hours for the England squad having touched down on Monday following their win over Spain for a reception at 10 Downing Street. But the party isn't over with the Lionesses now on an open top bus parade down The Mall in central London and heading towards Buckingham Palace. Are some of the best clips from the parade so far ... Early vibes on the bus ... Sunday's goalscorer has her say ... It came home ... Heading down The Mall ... What a way to toast the queens of Europe. 📸 Alex Pantling - 2025 Getty Images
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Forbes
Is This The Greatest Day In Golf Travel?
Yes, you can play three famous Bitish Open courses, all classic links, in one great day. Casual runners aspire to complete a marathon. Recreational cyclists often undertake a 'Century,' or 100-mile ride, for charity. But to up the ante in their sport, golfers typically just look to play a better, more historic, more famous course, rather than go longer or bigger. But now, thanks to the Hagen 54, they can do both—in one long, great day. In fact, playing three Open Championship (aka British Open) venues without an overnight break may just be the greatest day in golf travel. Last Thursday, one week after the world's best golfers teed it up in the Open at Royal Portrush, we saw the debut of the Hagen 54, a one-of-a-kind golf event that has been over a century in the making. The 'Father of professional golf,' Walter Hagen was the Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods of his time, before Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, and is credited with being the one to grow the game in America and really put golf on the map. His 11 Majors titles remains third only to those other two guys, and he amassed 44 PGA Tour wins and was Ryder Cup captain a record six times. There is always going to be debate about who is the sport's GOAT, but Hagen is always in the discussion, and with a doubt, one of the very, very best and highest profile golfers to ever live. British Open venue Royal Cinque Ports is a real deal seaside links—and one of the Top 100 Courses in ... More the World. As he recounted in his memoir, The Walter Hagen Story, his preparation for the 1920 Open was anything but routine. 'Anyone who knows the coastal links in Kent, south-east of London, will remember there are three links, adjoining each other. Deal, the first, Sandwich directly east, known as the Royal St. George's, then a little south of Sandwich and east lies Prince's links. While we were in London for the 1920 British Open, Jim Barnes and I started one morning to play the three links as if they were one. After playing eleven holes on the Deal course, we hopped a fence over to Sandwich and played ten holes there, crossed to Prince's links and completed all the holes there, coming back to the original starting place. We finished the remainder of the holes on the Sandwich and Deal layouts, ending up on the eighteenth at Deal. Scores? I've forgotten. We weren't trying to break any records. We were just lucky to go that far. We did it for fun.' Many courses in the UK go by both their place name and formal name, such as Sandwich/Royal St. George's, Hoylake/Royal Liverpool, and what he calls Deal is more widely known as Royal Cinque Ports. Right next door is the 27-hole links of Princes Golf Club, another historic British Open venue. History? Royal St. George's was the first course outside Scotland to host the Open, in 1894, and since then, 15 times. Royal Cinque Ports has done it twice (ironically, two other scheduled events were moved to its neighbor, Royal St George's, due to abnormally high tide flooding, so the history should be 13 and 4). Princes Golf Club (Hagen got it wrong, no apostrophe) has held the Open once, but considering there have only been 14 courses used for golf's oldest Major, and several of those have been removed from consideration (usually for logistic reasons such as limited room for hospitality or road infrastructure), it's still a really, really big deal. By comparison, the much younger US Open has been held on 52 different courses. Princes hosted the 1932 Open in which American great Gene Sarazen debuted his new invention, the sand wedge, for the first time, another turning point in the history of the game. Given the scary pot bunkers and sandy scrapes that make links golf so special, the tool came in very handy, and Sarazen set a new Open record of 283 here. A big bunker next to the final green, with walls so steep they need railroad ties to hold it up, is now memorialized as the famous Sarazen bunker, and in the Fifties the course was expanded to its current 27-hole size, so you can play here a couple of days in arow with a different mix of holes. How often do you get to play your 49th hole of the day? Royal St. Georges is currently ranked 20th in the world by Golf Digest, and Royal Cinque Ports 79th, and both are also in Golf Magazine's Top 100. But having played Royal Cinque Ports twice, as well as many others on the list, it is short-changed, and I guarantee you it is better than many (at least 10) courses ranked higher. So, in the footsteps of Hagen, this walking-only event plays all 54-holes of all three Open Championship courses, which happen to sit conveniently next to one another, in a single day, in the original order Hagen played them, hopscotching between courses (you no longer have to jump the fence, there's a gate). I partook of this fun, even though I had never walked more than 36 (many times) or played more than 45 (with cart). The long walk (around 21 miles and 43,500 steps) was easier than anticipated as it's fairly flat, but the fun factor was greater than I could have expected. There was a great opening reception, great closing dinner, food and drink stops all throughout the three layouts, and a feel-good attitude that can be hard to find in the sometimes stuffy world of old school historic golf clubs. Skip the Hedgehog, the Hagen 54 mascot, on draft Guinness alongside champagne at the opening ... More reception. Fun, friendliness and good humor ruled the day, and the organizers (the three clubs working together to boost local tourism) nailed every detail. They even created a special logo for the event, a Hedgehog named Skip, derived from the Old English for Hagen's nickname, the Haig, which means hedgehog. Every participant was given Skip logo gear, and they even had custom brewed Skip beers, lager and IPA, out on coolers along the course. I cannot speak for the other groups but our foursome debated the proposition of a beer consumption/lost ball ratio as a secondary challenge to simply finishing. At the opening ceremony one of the officiants stated that this was the only opportunity to play three Open venues in a single day without a helicopter, but I would posit that even unrestrained funding would make that difficult, especially since weather in the UK often grounds choppers, and most of the rother spots where three Open venues are in close proximity are also the most difficult tee times in golf to obtain. The chance of getting three coordinated tee times at three Open courses, playing each in the perfect time and then getting to the next is close to zero. Here you simply step out a gate. So that's the deal, or Deal. You get to play three exceptional links courses that are all pilgrimage worthy, and three of the 14 Open venues, in one day, with camaraderie, fun and lots of food and drink included. Obviously, being able to walk three rounds is a pre-requisite but it's not as hard as it sounds, and push carts (trolleys) are provided, with the option for caddies. The toughest logistics are that there just is not that much lodging in the region, and absolutely the marquee choice is the Lodge at Princes Golf Club, which is the only full-service golf resort in the area, with rooms for about 70-plus people (it's where Collin Morikawa stayed when he won the 2021 Open at Royal St. Georges). They also have great food (do not miss the exceptional sausage rolls), great hospitality and you can walk out the door and onto the course. I went a day early and played a preview/practice round on Princes, a great links course, and especially with 27-holes it is relatively easy to book in for extra golf before or after the big day. The Lodge at Princes Golf Club There are also some Spartan dorm style rooms in the Royal St. Georges clubhouse, but many people stay in a hotel or pub room in nearby Sandwich, an extremely well-preserved medieval town. Deal is a bit larger than Sandwich and just a couple of miles further. If you have time you can also try to get back out on St. Georges, Cinq Ports or nearby Rye, another acclaimed links. The inaugural event was such a success that a few groups immediately re-upped for 2026, as bookings opened just after we finished. It will undoubtedly sell out, so if you are interested I would not waste a lot of time, though there is always 2027 and beyond. The 2026 fee is £995 per person for the golf, two dinners, breakfast, and all the extras, like shirts and gifts, and food and drinks during the round. If you were playing the three courses on your own, it would cost at least £885 for greens fees, so it's a bit of a bargain. Caddies are available at your discretion, and lodging is extra. Collin Morikawa celebrates after winning the most recent Open played here, the 149th at Royal St ... More George's in 2021. (Photo by Warren Little/R&A/R&A via Getty Images) Sandwich is linked by high-speed rail to London in just over an hour, and connects via the Heathrow Express, though it's tough with clubs and luggage. Coming from Gatwick is physically closer but there are more flights to Heathrow, a 2-hour drive with no traffic. Most people book private van transfers. If you want to build out a bigger golf trip, it's entirely possible to combine with the many great courses of Liverpool, including another three Open venues and several Ryder Cup hosts, which I recently wrote about here at Forbes, or the great heathland courses outside London, such as Walton Heath and Sunningdale. But the big day is the main event, and as Hagen said, 'We were just lucky to go that far. We did it for fun.'
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
The world's first passenger jet was a luxurious death trap. Now it's been brought back to life
Sign up for Unlocking the World, CNN Travel's weekly newsletter. Get news about destinations, plus the latest in aviation, food and drink, and where to stay. Today, jet-powered plane travel is easy to take for granted. We're used to that surge of speed along the runway that pins us to our seats, those moments when we burst through ominous clouds into bright blue skies, and the gentle pings warning us to fasten seatbelts. And we're used to arriving at our destination in one piece. But commercial jet travel is only 73 years old. Britain's late Queen Elizabeth II was already the monarch when the de Havilland DH106 1A Comet G-ALYP took off from London Airport — as Heathrow was then known — about 3 p.m. on May 2, 1952, carrying the world's first fare-paying jet passengers. Over the next 23 hours, with five stops along the route, it made its way 7,000 miles south to Johannesburg. That flight marked a huge breakthrough in comfort and speed, compared to even the era's top-of-the-range propeller aircraft like the Lockheed Constellation. Gone were the constant vibrations and the sonic assault from piston engines. The world had suddenly, irreversibly, entered the jet age. And the first jet-plane builder to claim a place in the skies, beating out United States rivals like Boeing, was the British aviation company de Havilland. That advantage wouldn't last: the original Comet DH106 enjoyed only a brief reign before a series of catastrophes led its entire fleet to be pulled out of service and then tested to destruction or left to rot. Generations later, the only way to experience what it was like on board those first Comets is to look at grainy black-and-white film footage or color publicity photos of smiling families sitting on board DH106 1As. Or at least, until recently, those images were all we had. Now a gang of enthusiasts has painstakingly pieced one of those pioneering jetliners back together — with thrilling results. 'A beautiful sight' unknown content item - The de Havilland Aircraft Museum is one of the world's more obscure repositories of aviation artifacts. Located in a belt of farmland and greenery northwest of London, close to the eternally congested M25 highway that encircles the British capital, it's easy to miss. There are signposts, but they point to a narrow lane between hedgerows that looks as if it leads to a farmyard or dead end. Indeed, drive down it, and the first notable sight is a grand old manor house — Salisbury Hall, built in the 16th century and once home to Winston Churchill's mother — that usually oversees some kind of agricultural outpost. But keep going, turn a corner, and the museum reveals itself: a field filled with the hulks of old airplanes and a series of hangars that hint at more treasures inside. The site itself is a piece of aviation history. It was here, during World War II, that a local aircraft manufacturer, founded by British aviation pioneer Geoffrey De Havilland, began work to create and test the DH98 Mosquito, an unusual wood-framed combat plane renowned for its speed. After the war, in the late 1950s, a local entrepreneur seized upon the site's legacy to open what was Britain's first aviation museum. A bright yellow Mosquito, the only intact World War II prototype plane in existence according to museum staff, is one of the trophy exhibits at the modern de Havilland museum. It's beautifully restored, with its bomb doors hanging wide open and its large propellers, attached to Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, reaching forward. There are other de Havilland legends of the air, both civilian and military, on display. In the corner of the Mosquito hangar is the body of a Horsa glider, an unpowered WWII transport aircraft that was towed into the air and used to deliver troops and weapons behind enemy lines. In the next hangar — where passionate volunteers, who on some midweek days easily outnumber visitors, can be found deep in restoration projects — there's a DH100 Vampire, a single-seat fighter that was de Havilland's first jet plane. This bizarre-looking aircraft, with a twin-boom tail, was also designed at Salisbury Hall. But the hands-down star of the museum's largest show space is the de Havilland DH106 1A Comet. For the legions of people interested in passenger jet planes and their evolution into the complex engineering miracles that now criss-cross the friendly skies, this is a worthy place of pilgrimage. Its wings may be missing, but with its body decked out in period Air France livery, with a chrome-effect undercarriage, gleaming white roof, winged seahorse logo and French tricolor flag, the Comet is an eye-catching sight. 'It's a lovely-looking airplane, even now after all these years,' says retiree Eddie Walsh, a museum volunteer who heads up the project to restore and preserve the DH106. That wasn't always the case for this particular aircraft, Walsh explains. When the museum took delivery of it back in 1985, it was more or less a bare metal tube — the remains of the fuselage. 'It looked very sad. Every part of it has been recovered, so the original skin, in fact, was in a very, very poor condition.' 'Utter nightmare' Painstakingly, the volunteers slowly began restoring it to its aeronautical former glory — and today, the plane stands more or less as it would have nearly three quarters of a century ago, apart from those wings. 'We'd love to have the wings as well, but the wings would almost take up the whole bloomin' museum,' adds Walsh. This is a shame, since the Comet's wings were also a design to behold. Unlike most subsequent commercial aircraft, the plane had its engines, four de Havilland Ghost turbojets, molded elegantly into the wing itself rather than in pods attached below it. Despite their beauty and innovation, the fuel-thirsty engines weren't fully up to the job, struggling to drag the Comet into the air. This meant pilots sometimes pulled up too early or ran out of runway. The resulting accidents were horrendous, but the design and engineering shortcomings that eventually led to the Comet's demise were even more catastrophic. Before it became a byword for danger, though, the Comet was a showcase for the opulent possibilities of travel. At the rear of the aircraft, a staircase ascends into the tail end of the plane. Stepping through the door is a journey right back into the history of passenger aviation. The plane's interior has been lovingly recreated by Walsh's crew, down to the finest details. First there are the bathrooms. Unlike the single-sex facilities of modern planes, the original Comet had male and female toilets — the men's facilities fitted with a urinal, the women's with a chair, table and vanity mirror. In the main cabin, half of the plane has been recreated along its original lines, with comfortable rows of twin seats, upholstered in swirling blue fabric that matches the pattern of the red curtains. Each seat comes with plenty of legroom, as well as chrome cup holders and — because it was built in the 1950s, ashtrays for smokers who, despite the luxury, would've made flights an 'utter nightmare,' says Walsh. The seats look out of large rectangular windows, the signature of the first ever Comet planes — wrongly blamed at times for the plane's structural failures and replaced by rounder openings in later models. At meal times, cumbersome wooden trays were distributed by the cabin crew, for meals that served on proper plates and eaten with proper cutlery. Overhead, there are no luggage bins, but the museum has used 3D printers to recreate molded light fittings, each with a red button to summon the 'steward.' An almost impossible task Such is the accuracy of the cabin recreation, it's easy to imagine what it was like on board the Comet, with real clouds whipping by outside, rather than the static ones painted on the wall of the de Havilland Museum hangar. It's not a million air miles away from the planes we now fly in, but it was certainly aimed at offering a more exclusive aviation experience. That experience had to be made comfortable. Yes, the Comet had smooth jet engines and a pressurized cabin that allowed the plane to ascend 40,000 feet, well above the worst of the weather, and yes, it was faster than propeller-driven rival planes, but its maximum range of 1,750 miles (2,816 kilometers) was far less than that of earlier passenger service. Long journeys, like that debut flight to Johannesburg, did go faster in the Comet, but because they had to be completed in multiple stages, total flying times were still longer than their modern-day equivalents Nearer the front of the Comet, the first-class portion of the cabin more closely resembles a modern private jet than it does the premium seats of today's planes. Here, two pairs of seats face each other across a wooden table — a setup clearly aimed at the glamorous families. This was the height of luxury travel. The publicity photos of the time showed passengers decked out in posh frocks and tailored suits, often sipping cocktails or tucking into lavish meals. One memorable, but highly improbable, image shows a family cheerfully watching on as a youngster builds a house of cards on the first-class table. Even with smoother jet engines, those cards wouldn't have stood for long. The level of passenger wealth indicated in the pictures was accurate, though, says Walsh. 'It was very, very expensive,' he adds. 'I mean, on modern-day travel, you can pick up seats for next to nothing, relatively. But in those days, you had to be somebody of reasonable wealth to actually fly anywhere — especially in the Comet.' A single ticket on the Comet's first service to Johannesburg cost £175 — about £4,400, or close to $6,000, in today's money. Past the first-class section, there's a small galley kitchen, with a hot water boiler and sink, plus a luggage section where the giant cases and steamer trunks of the wealthy flyers were held in place by a flimsy piece of netting that must've been straining to hold them during times of turbulence. Then there's the flight deck — again, meticulously recreated by the museum's team, right down to the panel of analog dials and switches that would've been familiar to the Comet's pilots, many of whom cut their teeth flying World War II military aircraft. Here, the complicated setup hints at the efforts that have gone into restoring the plane. Recreating it was, says Walsh, 'bordering on an impossible task.' 'How the heck do you start that? It's one of those jobs where you could stand scratching your head. 'Where do we get the bits? How do we put them together? How do we lay them out? How do we light them? But it came out, in the end, very well.' 'Too high, too fast, too soon' Behind the seats for pilot and co-pilot, there are also chairs to accommodate a flight engineer, who would've monitored fuel consumption and kept an eye on the mechanics, and a navigator who used maps and a paper and pencil to plot routes. The navigator would also use a periscopic sextant to peer through the roof of the aircraft and calculate position based on the sun and stars — exactly like an ancient mariner. While all this might've been archaic compared to the digital systems used in the latest passenger planes, the Comet was cutting-edge in 1952. 'It went faster, it went higher, it was much smoother to ride,' Walsh says. 'It was a revelation — the Concorde of its day.' However, it did not hold onto that position for long. 'Too high, too fast, too soon, that was the trouble,' says Walsh. Back in the main cabin of the de Havilland Museum's Comet, one side of the aircraft has been stripped away to reveal the skin of the fuselage and the fixings around the airplane's windows, plus the rivets used to hold them in place. That cabin wall was the most fatal of the Comet's several flaws, as the aircraft quickly transformed from a triumph of inventive engineering to a terrifying study in design failure. On March 3, 1953 — not even a year since its first scheduled flight — a Comet became the first passenger jet plane involved in a fatal accident when a flight operated by Canadian Pacific Airlines crashed into a drainage canal during takeoff, killing five crew and six passengers. Two months later, another crash during takeoff in India killed all 43 people on board. Things got worse the following year. On January 10, 1954, a Comet broke apart in mid-air on a flight to Italy, killing 35 people on board. The incident raised the alarm that there were potential structural problems with the aircraft, resulting in a worldwide grounding for several weeks. Then, shortly after flights resumed, another mid-air accident on April 4, 1954, killed all 21 people on board. After that the Comet 1A was grounded for good. Water tank tests on Comet hulls later concluded that the aircraft's skin was unable to withstand the repeated pressurization and depressurization required for high-altitude flying. Cracks appeared around boltholes and rivets, resulting in explosive breaches in the fuselage around openings such as a cargo door or rooftop antenna. Next to the Comet, the de Haviland museum displays a section of fuselage that was tested to breaking point. It's a tribute to the thoroughness of the aviation investigators who sought to find the airplane's fatal flaws, but also a disturbing reminder of the tragic cost of pushing the frontiers of aviation. While the Comet 1A never flew commercially again, it spawned later versions that went on to be successful, equipped with more powerful Rolls-Royce jet engines and stronger fuselages. But by the time the Comet 4 entered service in 1958, it faced competition from Boeing's 707 and the Douglas DC-8, both of which were considered more efficient and desirable by the airlines of the time. De Havilland's status in commercial aviation had passed its zenith. The company was later bought by another British aviation giant, Hawker Siddeley, and the brand all but vanished — although a one-time subsidiary, de Havilland Canada, is still in operation. The Comet may have gone from the skies, but the legacy it left behind can still be seen in the airplanes we fly today. The innovation that went into the 1A, and the deadly mistakes that went with it, helped shape the aircraft that succeeded it and make them safer. 'Without somebody starting the whole thing and getting something in operation, then obviously everybody else won't follow,' adds Walsh. 'So it needs somebody innovating the idea, producing the idea and getting it working to say that an aircraft, a jet aircraft, can take off with passengers on board. 'The Comet is famed for the problems it had, which is a little bit unfair, because it was really an innovation of its time.'
