Hi,
First post on the forum, so please be gentle….
I’m trying to caption some photos at work of RAF Liberators and I have one taken at Kallang in Sep 45 with the forward fuselage visible bearing what I assume to be the con number “29-269” and another showing a 159 Sqn example wearing “30-191” taken in India in Aug 44.
This form of numbering appears on a couple of others I’ve found – BV978 “30-13 (42-64074)” and KH228 “36-20”.
Is there any way of identifying the respective Liberators using these mystery numbers?
MTIA,
Lee
By: Matt Poole - 15th November 2016 at 13:58
[QUOTE=Air Histerical;2355986]This form of numbering appears on a couple of others I’ve found – BV978 “30-13 (42-64074)” and KH228 “36-20”.
Hi, Lee.
Slight correction on one of your serials. 30-13 is BZ978.
Graham nailed it in his explanation. The known numbers for the Modification Centers (located in the US, so they were Centers, not Centres) are few and far between, and there is no direct relationship between MCns and serial numbers. For example, from the Oughton book, KG967 is MCn 30-358, but 12 serials later the next know MCn, for KG979, is 34-14, not 30-370. Another example: KG935 is MCn 29-192, but 14 serials later the next known MCn, for KG949, is 36-4, not 29-206.
From my familiarity with Liberator photos and activities, I might be able to match up a photo showing an MCn to a serial number not known from the photo. If you’re willing to send me a photo as a test, please do. Contact me via private message.
The Oughton book, unfortunately, has tons of errors (and a massive amount of excellent info).
Cheers,
Matt
By: Graham Boak - 15th November 2016 at 13:04
Oughton’s is a wonderful book if you like Liberators, so I hope you are successful and enjoy it whether it helps you or not. I have however found a section where he writes about the problems of associating MCns with serials, and that it really doesn’t work. This is (largely) because the aircraft were delivered from a number of different production lines, from different batches within those lines, and the Modification Centres did not necessarily have the right parts for each of these alternatives when the aircraft arrived, so they worked on the ones that they could in preference.
By: Air Histerical - 15th November 2016 at 12:53
Thanks Graham.
It was always going to be a long shot, but I’ll track the book down and see what happens.
Lee
By: Graham Boak - 14th November 2016 at 15:21
These are Modification Centre numbers, but it seems no complete list is known. B-24s intended for the RAF were delivered from the production line these Centres to be modified to meet specific RAF requirements. The first number identifies specific series: 29 are GR Mk.Vis (implicity, for the RAF) delivered up to March 1945, 30 is for the first series of B Mk.Vis delivered up to December 1944, and 36 is the first series of B Mk.VIIIs delivered up to December 1944. This is taken from the Air Britain book The Liberator in RAF and Commonwealth Service, by James Oughton. This book does provide an individual listing of each airframe’s history but sadly the MCn only appear rarely in the series you are interested in, although almost complete for 40-series MCns. It is possible that I missed some in a quick read-through, but the odds are heavily against such being one you are interested in. It may be possible to come close to the ones you want by extrapolating (counting serials) from known examples, but I’d expect that to be unreliable.
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November 14, 2016 at 12:15 pm