Aircraft Restoration and Preservation – The Future.

As far as flying aircraft go, they are entirely dependant on oil. As we move away from it, and we find different technologies to do the work it used to, piston engined aircraft will be increasingly sidelined. We won’t see them permanently grounded in my lifetime, but the time will come.

An exhibit should engage the viewer so audio visual displays will increase with virtual reality becoming more useful.Static airframes might not be enough although the keen enthusiast always likes to see them once. Displays will decrease in number but the quality will be constant and special effects included to compete with other attractions.

One insightful journalist wrote recently that “the 21st Century is falling into place around our heads”. So much as Museums and restoration agendas make sense to children of the 20th Century, so the Museum in one hundred years will reflect the themes of this new century. I can sense the following :

1. The revitalization of Chinese, Indian and Japanese Museums as history becomes a tool justifying current readjustments in global affairs led by the resurgence of China. So as Anglophone Museums may wither, dynamic, New Museums with budgets will draw airframes and well renumerated staff from the Old to reinterpret the New. You may not like the New!

2. The Drone will become the most contentious display of the 21st Century Museum. It represents a failure of Anglophone imagination and thus it will become the principal display in any Museum wanting to diminish Western ideas. “They slaughtered us with These so they could keep Shopping.” Some young person will throw red paint on a drone display in the West and elderly Machine Centric Museum trustees will shake their heads and a further gap will open up between dusty displays and young people choosing to do other things. One rebel Museum in the West with no budget will display a drone with Wikileaks footage showing wedding parties being shredded but there will be queues to get in. I hope drone pilots do this because I already shudder to think about how abandoned they will be by Governments and Us once they wash out. There will be a need for a Truth and Reconciliation Drone Museum to at least help them avoid becoming the 21st Century’s marginalized Vietnam Vet. This Museum might also examine the successful use of airpower in Policing by the RAF in the 1930’s, when leaflets were dropped on Day 1, if no luck after 2 days, crops were set alight, if no luck after 2 days precision strikes were made on hold outs who had one week to get their women and children out of the way. Then the 1930 RAF Policing budget will be compared to the 2015 Drone budget and an Effectiveness analysis made. Do the same for Hitler’s Vengeance drones, the V1 and V2, which were at least honestly described by that government as devices of Terror. So we need a Hawker Hart biplane next to a V1 and Predator Drone and documentary interviews with drone strikers and survivors. A conversation, measured, confronting, indignant, chilling. No Museum will get more press coverage. It’s really about People applying technology, not the technology. Drones are the future, but test your ideas: how do you want your children or grandchildren treated by them in the 21st Century? The drones are coming. So give me a Museum that is about the future.

3. To the unborn, a Defiant, Spitfire, Hurricane, ME 109, BF 190, Mustang and Wildcat, as preposterous as it will be to the 20th Century student of the art, be look-alike monoplanes with dangerous paddles out the front, used in a world war which may have started in 1860 something, or 1933 something or 2002. History tends to compress. You might not know the difference between a 16th Century Portuguese Caravel and an 18th Century Man-o-War; they are all wooden boats with sails, but upon this technology great themes and Empires evolved. So certain aircraft types will travel into the preposterous future : The Spitfire versus the Stuka, the Mustang versus the Zero. Only because biplanes look different the Camel will not be confused with the Hurricane, although the short twenty years between them will invite abbreviation in future conciousness. The Youngsters of the 21st Century may be forced as school children to march through caverns of this stuff in dark Museums peopled by cranky, wrinkly, disapproving creatures. This will be caused by Museums thinking that it is their job to preserve Machines, and that Machines speak for themselves. One or two Museums will adopt Plato’s motto : “He who does not know what has come before him, will forever see the world as a child.” They will accordingly make their displays about People, so a young person can say “ That Person in the Display could be me.” So a display about a Pilot, preferably a young pilot who dies for their country and why, will make the Machine that remains start to speak. Museums will cross promote with Movie Makers, to have Blockbuster displays timed with the release of Movies about People in Machines. These Museums will be 80% storage and restoration, with 20% on display, display 100% rotated every six months based on themes about People. They will use shop display professionals to set these up, not cranky old goats. Really, many Museums are Men’s Sheds, which is not a bad thing, as long as the Men’s Shed doesn’t overawe the Museum. Because Museums are so badly led, they end up being dependant on free labour, being Old Goats, but nothing is free, and the Old Goats can mist over an organisation with other forms of compensation that turn it into a Goat Fiefdom. That’s OK in the storage zone, but the Shop Front and direction must absolutely be the domain of Young Roosters.

4. The day of Gloomy Museums having a monopoly on machines will, thankfully, pass. Modern manufacturing productivity improvements, aged metallurgy and keen people will make things fly, even if there is not an original rivet in it. So the Flying Museum will flourish and the Dark Cavern with Barriers will sink further into the gloom. The Flying Museum will negotiate tax arrangements to make it attractive to donate your aircraft in when you are ready to hang up your helmet. The Flying Museum may be virtual : it may simply be a network of individual aircraft owners who ‘flash mob’ a particular airfield at a given moment. The Flying Museum will offer vocational training courses to young people who leave school early, to teach them about engine rebuilding, welding, the English wheel. The Flying Museum will once a year do cross country flights and beat up small towns and land at a local airfield and set up a tent with displays about People and Machines. It will research ahead and find out that someone, totally forgotten, born in that small town flew in this Machine and died aged 21 in France in 1940. It will offer paid flights and change lives. The first woman on one of Jupiter’s moons will first take her first flight in a Spitfire flown by her great grandmother in a Transport Squadron.

That’s probably enough controversy for one post!!

…and the F3 was pretty rare in the air at shows.

The Tornado F3 is pretty rare now, full stop!

Apart from twenty-four in Saudi Arabia there are perhaps four left in existence; the MOD scrapped the rest to recover the parts for the Tornado GR4 fleet (which may be busy for a few years yet)!

In the UK I think museum wise the current era is going to be a bit on the thin side, there seems to be more an intention to destroy, previously a lot of Buccaneers and Canberras, etc were in the reach of private individuals, and static rebuilds were feasible and more importantly fundable.

These days unless you are much wealthier than your average enthusiast, the present what almost seems like a cartel on parts, with dealers who seem to have sometimes totally unfathomable businesses, example the unsold stripped Lynx airframes purposely destroyed, parts to rebuild those are about now, but obviously those airframes each one would have had a buyer for those parts, totally self defeating. On Ebay, one dealer springs to mind who sells an item then lists another the same and increases the price, continuing until they price themselves out of the market, and it just auto re list’s continuously not selling. The inability to access scrap airframes creates further shortages, I in the past got one cockpit from literally off a scrap heap, and one came from a scrap skip.

I know many people who started doing smaller projects, instrument panels etc who grew into taking more ambitious projects, and many museums have benefitted from this. If you wanted to construct just a Tornado Instrument panel display you would be looking at thousands of pounds, most museums wouldn’t be able to do this on their own.

I think after the Cold war era for museums it will be pretty stagnant military wise, should have lots of older exhibits in tip top condition with not much in the way of new distractions, for the museum volunteers.

Sounds as though NAM and IWM Duxford are on similar journeys, TO!:)

farnborough – I too have often wondered why dead and to be disposed of assets are never offered to museums. I am sure the MoD would have an answer but just how convincing would it be….?

😀 Too busy ‘planning’ at the moment for a detailed response, however!

Museum Accreditation requires a minimum of a Five Year Forward Plan to be in place; longer if possible.

NAM will shortly start planning ahead for the next 20 years – bizarrely just noticed it’s on an Agenda for next week!

Purely out of curiosity farnboroughrob, which out of Lynx, Gazelle, Sea King, Harrier GR9, Tornado F3 would you like to see in preservation?

I would like to see the harrier GR9 but that is obviously not very practical! Failing that the Tornado F3 would be my pick. Living down south the helicopters have always been around but have never seen enough Tonkas, and the F3 was pretty rare in the air at shows.
I think its just sad the way MoD now dispose of their ‘assets’ would be nice if at least a few from each type were gifted to the likes of Newark, MAM, NEAM, Aeroventure etc. Lets face it £30k for a airframe is peanuts to the MoD but a fortune to a museum.

We have always been notoriously unable to foretell the future and what it might bring. I think we would be pleasantly surprised by what transpires.

Some of the CGI and interactive stuff available now is stunning and almost defies belief. This can only get even better.

Who would have foretold that there would be more Spitfires flying in 2000 than there were in 1950 back in the 1970’s? There are all sorts of prospective projects, big money and well-founded and funded organisations who will bring us things we could only ever dream of.

I anticipate great things though, of course, there will be the inevitable regrets about stuff lost, but that, as unhappy a situation as it is, is always the case.

We need to use our imaginations – something us older types are, generally, quite poor at. The youngsters of tomorrow will see to it that the past will be better represented and realised via computer-based tech than ever before.

Anon.

😀 Too busy ‘planning’ at the moment for a detailed response, however!

Museum Accreditation requires a minimum of a Five Year Forward Plan to be in place; longer if possible.

NAM will shortly start planning ahead for the next 20 years – bizarrely just noticed it’s on an Agenda for next week!

Purely out of curiosity farnboroughrob, which out of Lynx, Gazelle, Sea King, Harrier GR9, Tornado F3 would you like to see in preservation?

as a museum consumer I can see a couple of issues.
Stagnation of new exhibits. This has already happened with the lack of Lynx, Gazelle, Seaking, Harrier GR9, Tornado F3 in out voluntary run museums. One the Tornado retires there is likely to be nothing coming from the Military for years. As has been pointed out volunteers are going to be a big issue. There wont be the early retirees in good health to be active volunteers. We are going to all be working until we are nearly 70 and will be claped out after that. I think we will still have WW2 ‘reproduction’ aircraft as we have WW1 replicas but the later jets will disappear. With less and less people serving in the armed forces the veterans in 30 years will, hopefully, be few and far between. I guess I was the last generation (im 46) to grow up with a substantial number of WW1 and WW2 veterans? Will there be the interest still in aviation when we just fly around in metal tubes with no charterer and there are no more live ‘war stories’?

Interesting thoughts. My own experience already bears out your last point to some extent.

This forum is populated by some of the best experience and knowledge available. So as one very much in the evening of life I wonder what my grandchildren and their children will be looking at in 30/40 years time. Will more be available or will increasing costs reduce what will be seen? Will today’s levels of interest be greater or lesser?

Here are a couple of thoughts. I think that increasing regulations and de-mill laws will mean that there is cutoff point where newer aircraft that are retired will not end up in civilian hands at all. My guess is that cutoff point is somewhere with aircraft of the 1970s. It’s kind of surprising that there are Mig-29s in private hands, but I find it hard to imagine that there will be many F-16s or F-15s, unless the Collings Foundation obtains one. The future of military combat aircraft will likely shift to pilotless aircraft and drones-cheaper to make and lose in combat and no human factors to consider.

For older stuff and especially very rare types, I think we are entering a new era where 3D scanning and manufacturing technology will make it much easier to tool up and rebuild a rare example at a significantly lower cost. I think as long as there is fuel available and they are not grounded by regulations, older aircraft will continue to be restored and flown but probably by fewer and more wealthy collectors. I think future generations will have less interest in WW1 and WW2 aircraft since that time is fading into memory, so major museums might see fewer visitors and money. Larger multi-engine bomber types will probably become too expensive to fly except for exhibition displays such as the Flying Heritage Collection and I think regulators will probably put passenger flights under tighter scrutiny.

Thanks Ken for the spell checker but ..RAF?

warferry – indeed so – an experience I have had in Airspace on occasion although I have not been upstairs there for a year or more.

Staying with Duxford I look forward to learning more about their Master Plan, referred to in the current Dixgord News. A 20 year plan is projected to encompass every aspect of the museum’s activities.

The AVRO 707 isn’t massively significant if your looking at milestones of flight. You could argue that the Vimy replica due to
the 1919 crossing and all that entailed to air travel is far more significant.

If they had any sense they would get milestones of flight to actually have significant aircraft in it. The avro 707, and prototype lightning would fit in well.

“Yeovilleton”…reminds me of RAF Yeovilton, Somerset. Is it the same Place?

There was a similar topic raised on here a year or two ago and the biggest factor discussed was the question of retirement and pensions. With people working longer and pensions getting smaller, the museum sector seems likely to lose a big chunk of its voluntary workforce in the future.

As for interest from future generations, I always see that as something that is in our hands and not a foregone conclusion.

Arco will be busy restoring drones to flying condition 🙂

…the Curator of Yeovilleton many moons ago said to me it would mostly be interactive.

We may be on the cusp of a whole new era of ‘interactive’ displays at museums (and elsewhere); especially as the major events in historic aviation pass from living memory.

I think that ‘enhanced reality’ offers some amazing opportunities to pull the younger generations back into the past; you could now point your iPad / iPhone skyward and watch the Battle-of-Britain unfold in realtime in front of your eyes (or on the screen you spend much of your time looking at anyway). Imagine if the RAF Museum set-up an enhanced reality zone at Kenley or Biggin Hill; you could ‘watch’ a low level attack by Luftwaffe aircraft unfold before your eyes.