The Fourteenth annual Bournemouth Air Festival will take place from 2nd September 2022 through to the 5th September 2022
Here’s some GREAT news! After all the doom and gloom of the Covid epidemic it looks like the Bournemouth Air Festival will be here in September to cheer us all up. The four day event will be packed (as usual) with exotic air displays and will feature both historic aircraft as well as cutting edge aviation.
I believe the Red Arrows have already been signed up. Displays by the Typhoon, as well as many historic aircraft, are also on the cards. The Air Show team do a wonderful job in securing and setting up this display year in year out. Rather than present a duplicate of the participants may I refer you to the main airshow website which should should contain the very latest information. It is Here On This Link.
Bournemouth Air Festival: Extra Parking
As there is a great influx of visitors to the air show, Bournemouth Council open up a park-and-ride scheme. This operates very well and has been a success ever since the inception of the air show. Around 800,000 people attend the the Bournemouth Air Festival so as you can appreciate, parking in Town over the period is fraught. I would suggest that out of town visitors use the park and ride.
Evidently parking at Kings Park will be free. But as Kings Park is quite a distance from the beach there is a bus system where a return ticket will cost £10 (Thur & Sun) and £12 (Fri & Sat). This will cover up to seven people travelling. There will be about a ten minute walk from the drop off point to the beach. Parking will now also be available from Redhill on Saturday and Sunday.
The other sites used in previous years will not be open. For reference the park and ride drop off point near the beach will be at Manor Road ( postcode: BH1 3EZ) This will be a short walk from either Boscombe Beach or Bournemouth East Cliff Beach. Both are excellent vantage points.
Park-Ride Open Times are as follows:
Kings Park (BH7 7AF)
- Thursday 9.00am – last bus at 11pm
- Friday 9.00am – last bus at 11pm
- Saturday 9.00am – last bus at 11pm
- Sunday 9.00am – last bus at 7pm
Redhill (BH9 2SW)
- Saturday 9.00am – last bus at 11pm
- Sunday 9.00am – last bus at 7pm
If the report from the Bournemouth Air that parking is free and only the bus incurs a charge then (for example) if the bus was full or delayed in traffic is it perfectly possible for reasonably fit people to walk from Kings Park to the sea-front. It will take about half and hour and is around one and a quarter miles. Then the cost of parking for the day would be free!
Redhill though is a different prospect. It would take an hour and a quarter to walk to the beach and is over three and a half miles to the same beach location.
Other Options (Bus)
Unfortunately the main bus operator in Bournemouth (Yellow Buses) has just gone bust and only very limited Yellow Bus services are running. But the other major bus company in the area (More Buses) is fine. It would be worth checking out the possibility of parking up out of area and then catching a bus in to the town centre.
As an example: One such bus is the Number 13 (Saturday Timetable shown on link) that runs (more or less) every half-hour from Wimborne right down to Bournemouth Square. You could select somewhere on its route, park up nearby (say in Wimborne central Car Park or somewhere in West Parley) and then catch the bus. For a couple, the overall bus fare should be much the same as the parking charge, which I would think is around £6-7 per person. The full list of More Bus buses, their routes and timetabling is Here. From Wimborne the bus normally takes about an hour and from West Parley about half an hour to reach Bournemouth Square.