Plans submitted for sculpture at Lincoln College in memory of RAF pilot

Plans have been submitted for a memorial sculpture to be built an the Lincoln College site on Monks Road.

The intention is to erect a memorial sculpture to Squadron Leader Sam Bailey on Lincoln College Group’s Lincoln College site.

Squadron Leader Bailey was killed while flying a Tornado GR4 over the Moray Firth on July 3, 2012.

Plans for the new sculpture

Following his death, the Bailey family set aside a sum of money to build a lasting memorial to him and sought the help of the Royal Air Force Association (RAFA) to identify a suitable location.

RAFA approached Lincoln College Group to place the memorial at the home of its new Air and Defence Career College.

Providing plans are approved, it is hoped the sculpture and Sam Bailey’s memory will help inspire generations of students to come to enter the Royal Air Force and the wider aerospace industry.

If plans are approved, the memorial sculpture will be situated on the Lincoln College site on Monks Road

Lincoln College Group approached local firms, Optima Design and Rilmac to create the sculpture concept and produce and install the structure.

Optima have created an abstract interpretation of ‘the joy of flight’, which sees a conceptual visualisation of an aircraft soaring through the clouds to the heavens.

The sculpture will feature a laser-cut memorial inscription from the Bailey family and laser-cut excerpts from the poem, High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, which he wrote when serving as an airman at RAF Digby.

The sculpture has a footprint of 7.8m squared, with a cloud element height of 1.9m and aircraft element height of 3.5m.

It will be made of rolled stainless steel, in keeping with materials used in structural elements of the current landscape and street furniture.