Aston Down, up until the mid/late 90’s, stored large quantities of MOD jigs, rigs and tooling. In the early 80’s I visited an area at AD where jigs had been recently scraped and picked up a discarded data plate from one of these …it was Avro York!. Also I was amazed to find on the east side of the airfield a number of Gloster Javelin jigs, .. these survived to the late 1980’s. Even in the early 1990’s I noted the following jigs scattered around the various hangers , Gnat, Nimrod MR2&AEW3, Victor, Vulcan, Jaguar, Harrier, and Phantom. From the data plates, the Phantom jigs were manufactured in the UK, shipped Stateside to produce the A/C, and then returned to AD for long term storage …..& scrapping!. Other items either stored here or allegedly stored here included;-The Phantom fatigue airframe (in fact a former flying development aircraft), Large quantities of aero engine tooling , development test engines e.g RB199/Peg/Oly, 6 spare Merlin’s for the Bosc blower rig, AWE test equipment/development rigs/weapons production tooling (In a high Security central compound hanger cleared out c1982), and according to at least one person, TSR2 jigs (apparently up until early 80’s… but not confirmed by own observations).

During Nimrod MRA4 development, the stored MR2 jigs were examined but where found to be too badly corroded for reuse…….. So new ones were produced.