The Hatfield Skip

Apologies for the slight thread creep, but I heard a Hatfield story this week which Made me laugh, so I thought I’d share it with you. I had the honour to meet a pilot this week, who upon leaving the RAF a good few years ago, applied for a job at Hatfield. Prior to this he had been on a test pilots exchange tour with the USAF at Edwards AFB Stateside, where he had worked with NASA on the development of winglets. When he left the RAF he asked what he could and couldn’t talk to any prospective employers about, they said hs pilots notes he could use, but that was it, no references to any documents etc.

So when BAe Hatfield asked him what he’d been working on recently he mentioned winglets to see if they’d be interested,

“No sonny, we build wings right in the first place!” came the reply.

Rescued from the SKIP!!!

Just to follow on the ‘Skip’ connection, and to hightlight aviation travesties, a certain Heritage group rescued the original wind tunnel models of the Lightning P1, F6, T4 and TSR 2 from a skip at … (unspecified airfield)… some many years back as the removal truck turned up to take it away.

Just imagine !

Anyway, they are now safe and sound and on public display at Bae events im happy to say.

So what else out there of major aviation importance has just been dumped?

Lee,

‘So much for Pathos’

Bruce

Isn’t that where the Cypriot Shackletons cling to survival?

Mark

Lee,

Thats good – if the library does have WG236’s diary, and I have WG240, then we are doing well. Neil Thirsk has the one for XF828, and I have the one for XJ494 (I think!)

Looks like we are covering the bases!

You would be welcome to borrow the ones I have – they will be going to the museum in due course, but NOT until it is secure.

Arthur,

Sadly, we know that a lot of archive material did end up in the skip. I am at a loss to understand why we didnt empty it and drag it back to the museum for sorting. At least some of it was saved.

‘So much for Pathos’

Bruce

Skips and important documents are not uncommonly linked!

About 18 months ago I was speaking with a curator from a museum [non-aviation] in the Lutterworth area. Someone had recently rescued some of the original Whittle Engine Patent documentation from skip in their local area – when the person highlighted the importance of the documents to the dumper, their reaction was – “So what, who’s he?”

I used to visit the Flight Development archives in the late 1980s when I was at Hatfield working as a Flight Development Engineer. The archives were across in the old DH engine test building on the other side of the airfield. I thought the DH110 diaries, which remember looking at, were held elsewhere. I certainly remember reading WG236s as the Farnborough entry was very poignant.

I suspect some stuff may have been ‘liberated’ beforehand.

I cannot believe they would end up in a skip – absolutely scandalous – then again nothing about BAe (BAE) should surprise me. I thought all the archive stuff went to Farnborough. I was responsible for some stuff especially old 125 bits that Raytheon didn’t want.

Sorry, this probably doesn’t help at all

AP

The document I refer to may well be a diary – it’s so long since I saw it. Does my description ring a bell? This must have been WG236’s diary as the photos were very definitely of ‘236. I seem to recall the entry for 6th Sept 1952 being very understated and subdued – something like “Crashed Farnborough”.

Lee,

What I have is not so much the flight test reports, as the Flight test diaries. They are hand written by the guys in flight test, and cover much of the life of WG240. I dont have one for WG236. Some of it is in Derry’s own hand – until after the loss of ‘236 when JC flew 240 back to Hatfield.

Yes, we still have the other documents, but all of this stuff needs to be saved – it is so much history!

Yes, Henry is still around, but is getting frail these days.

Bruce

Bruce

You say the DH110 flight test reports? I clearly remember Henry Rolfe (is he still around?) had a proper bound copy of the DH110 flight test reports. That is probably going back 15 yrs or so, and IIRC the document had dark green end papers. Certainly there were the photos of WG236 with wool tufts on the wings and the boom stiffeners fitted. Is this the same thing? If so, bit bemused as to why you had to buy one of Ebay when it should have been in the library? I do recall Henry saying that this particular artefact was rescued from the bin at Hatfield.

Also in March 1994 John Wilson typed up all of WG236 and WG240’s entries from the logbook of John Cunningham and amalgamated them with the flight test reports from John Derry, John Wilson, Chris Capper and Jock Elliot. He sent me a copy at the time (looking at it now!). I seem to recall he said he was going to produce a copy for the Museum too.

Lee

Ooh – thats interesting – We did get some stuff back from Filton, mostly engine stuff, but I will chase this up.

Some of the de Havilland archive – particularly the photo archive is at Farnborough. I dont know the extent of the remaining archive, but given that I have some very interesting flight test reports (which may be duplicates), I am sure it isnt complete. It may be that Hatfield disposed of the flight test library, but not the main archive.

Thanks for the tip off!

Bruce

Bruce
When you say not at Farnborough do you mean the old RAE archive now at FAST or the BAESYSTEMS archive?

A big piece of the Hatfield archive (Some Comet, lots of Trident, even some Sea Vixen and some other 50’s-70’s project stuff) was moved to Filton. Now, I saw it there in the late 90’s, but given Filton has more or less split from BAESYSTEMS I’m not sure if it remains there. In theory it may have moved to BAESYSTEMS Farnborough archive. This in itself is quite a significant archive but I never really got a chance to have a good look through it. I saw a lot of Comet stuff in the Chad archive.