Bray Air Display 2022

... no the Red Arrows didn't appear, and neither did the Battle of Britain memorial flypast, all in all a disappointing slow moving day.

Dart service fell over, that's on irish rail. They along with TFI advertised additional services and capacity and neither appeared to be the case before the airshow anyway.

What do you want the organisers to do about that ??

There's never been this level of issue with the dart to bray when the airshow is on.

For what the organisers could control that was car parking, from what I could see everything was moving well enough into the car parks, delays as usual as with every air show day with traffic out onto the m50 but nothing out of the ordinary there for the day thats in it, Gardai at every junction into Bray on point duty with traffic lights turned off to let traffic move quicker.

Irish Rail will have alot to answer for but that'll be really about it.

When you live here you get used to the traffic that comes with Airshow weekend and it wasn't anything out of the ordinary on the roads anyway, if anything it was more organised car parking wise this year.

Yup, there's 2 sidings just past the station along with turn around points further on down before it becomes a 1 track line.

There's never been this amount of hassle with the darts when the airshow is on.

When I was leaving the seafront both platforms were being used for services heading into Dublin with more darts lined up waiting behind & some waiting to enter Bray coming the other way, held on the dargle bridge

They could have the Blue Angels dogfighting the Red Arrows next year, I still won't ever touch that airshow in Bray again. Id understand if today was a once off but it's a total shambles every year.

I hope they bring back the airshow to Galway, the organisers there always managed to run everything well.

I posted earlier on this thread - never again, I normally take these things with a pinch of salt but that was not worth it in anyway. Dragged the whole family on train to bray and paid for family ticket which was never checked once - I must have been the only one who bought a ticket for the day. Absolute carnage. Still on the maynooth train back home..

it’s taken us longer to get to bray and back than it did to travel to Italy last month

Yeah that was absolutely crap. Who wants to look at a Garda helicopter do 3 or 4 fly pasts. Slow moving planes and an awful crowd full of scumbags smoking weed and drinking. An awful day will never go again.

Today was disappointing. The rain at Baldonnel didn't help things, but surely the organisers will have been well aware of the forecast, and things could have been rejigged.

Ou usual parking area was off limits, and is just minutes from the seafront. We ended up parking much further down (pre-booked), and ended up walking for around an hour both ways because the shuttle service only had a few buses for the amount of people queuing. We'd have been quicker walking than queuing.

I can see the Air Corps often, but it was still nice to see them today, along with others that managed to perform.

It is disappointing that what we're considered the main acts didn't even get off the ground.

The airshow was only on for the one day, rather than two, so no doubt there were more today than usual.

Have to say I don't think I'd bother going to this again, the lack of comunication from organisers was the most annoying thing for me, they put nothing up on the air shows twitter or website all day about cancellations, I could have at least gone home early if I knew the few planes I went to see were unlikely to be able to display instead of waiting around naively and wasting the whole day standing in queues etc. I understand that some things are unavoidable at the moment like difficulty staffing hospitality and the fact that a free event will sometimes attract a rough element that has little or no interest in planes but a simple tweet explaining the situation wouldn't have cost anything. We were at the North end of the beach and couldn't hear any announcements, dunno why they couldn't but an extra loudspeaker up there.

I was wondering while I was on a sweltering hot train today, is there some technical reason why the trains air con seems to switch off for inordinate periods despite it being so overheated? Surely a sensor would keep it on and within a certain temp, or did the driver just not switch it on. It felt like there was a low level of oxygen after being on it for over an hour. I know the IR commuter trains are about 20 years old but surely the air con should be on permanently since the windows don't open.

I absolutely agree with everyone commented here. Please allow me to write (rant from my armchair) here how I have seen it, some of my views are similar with others, some may disagree.

Thank god we took the bus instead to Bray, but waiting 2 hours for a bus to get home that was just insane (read that before here the Dart was not too much better either), never experienced this anywhere else even at bigger festivals and shows. Buses should have been coming and leaving continuously. Seriously on the way back to Dublin after leaving Bray I have seen a Dublin Bus depot with full of buses, obviously not going anywhere. Not to mention all those scumbags cutting the queues... fck off you privileged m0ron... And the cutie who is on the phone wandering down the queue like she has no idea (classic cutting the line trick) and suddenly she is on the bus and you are still waiting there for an other hour. And all the people cutting in and waving to their family to follow... seriously people... And Garda is there at the buses handling the queue and asking people if they go to Greystones etc. what is going on guys, the queue were full of people smoking weed... Oh well, the bus was at least free!

I do photography so I was often scanning around with my camera and I could see the signs of boredom everywhere. Most people were just chatting, playing, swimming, kids are running all over the place like they don't really care about anything. Huge amount of strollers blocking the way out at the rail tracks and moms chitchatting about siht and not moving. I would say the actual amount of people who were interested about the planes were like 20-30% of those attended, maybe less, the 70-80% went to a funfair.

Also not too much information about anything coming as we were at the left side, it was extremely hard to hear the loud speakers, sometimes could not even hear anything. Of course this was my problem as why I was there on the side and not in the middle, right?

For me most of the planes were too far. If the CASA (btw it was not even on the lineup, where they summoned that from?) could come closer why the others went out that much? Even some of the planes I believe which have better maneuvering capabilities went out far away. I have a 600mm+ telephoto lens but even with that sometimes it was hard to get a photo :) And where was the A320? Was that also scheduled for the end? Not that I would not see those around Dublin Airport but that is boring. I wanted to take some good photos when it is next to Bray Head :)

And finally the cancellation. We cannot tell what really was in the mind of the organizers to not to reschedule the main attraction before the weather turns bad. Unfortunately this is what happened and we cannot really do too much about it, they may be messed up, did not manage the project well, who knows. Everyone wanted to see the reds etc but hey, weather is weather, mistake is mistake and we are the ones who are complaining here about everything from our armchairs :)

Next time I would rather pay just have an organized public transport and without all those idiots around, but as others have already mentioned it would be really hard to justify going next time. Maybe we will all be there next time and they surprise us, who knows!

And finally videos are popping up on Tiktok too about the "events" if anyone is interested:

tiktok.com/@xposties/video/7123965980258209029

tiktok.com/@hayleydoyle825/video/7123959868662320389

tiktok.com/@jtaobr/video/7123983192314350854