Preservation issues – UK

It seems that whenever the word ‘Vulcan’ and ‘small aircraft museum’ are mentioned in the same sentence, regardless of the thread title people will inevitably be drawn into the ‘You should kill the over represented types in your collection and concentrate on the rare ones’ arguement. I thought it was time that there was a dedicated thread for this arguement.

Please refrain from using museum’s names in a bad way and personal comments are strictly banned. Lively debate is the order of the day. I want your thoughts on the preservation movement as a whole airworthy and non, rare and common, home grown and foreign aircraft….

Let me start you off….

In my opinion, (which is limited to static airframes for now) there is large duplication of airframes in the UK… say for example Gannets, Canberras and Mysteres. I believe this is a good thing. In my ivory tower ‘oop north’ I have to travel for atleast two hours to get to the nearest museum which is reasonably well funded. I do not want to do this every couple of weeks. My local museum has a large variety of aircraft, many of which are not restored or in the process of being restored. Most types are available at other museums in better condition. I for one, cannot see certain types of aircraft, let alone work on them if my local, underfunded museum does not have a representative of the type.

Repetition is good – Not so long ago, a hangar fell down crushing a Lancaster (and killing a worker – RIP), imagine if this was the sole representative of the type. The world would now have NO WWII heavy bombers. God forbid, but imagine if this was to happen at Brooklands and the Wellington!

Many small museums once had a policy of ‘collect it and deal with it later’ – with hind sight, was this a good thing?

Should rare aircraft be allowed to stay in small under funded places when large or national collections would look after them better?

Should rare aircraft be allowed to fly?

Thoughts please gentlemen and women……