Somebody wanted a Blinder..

Regarding RAFM. Under the late John Tanner the push was evident to become “more” than just an RAF Museum ,in the absence of a National Collection or policy. Under Michael Fopp the direction is seeming to be returning to that a more focussed existence. He can best speak for himself of course, but I do recall his concern in a conversation some years ago regarding the continued justification for retaining some exhibits, the Do 24 for example. It subsequently went to the Netherlands as I recall. Incidentally has anybody actually taken the issue up on site with Al Maclean?

Dave T. Thanks for the clarification. I gather it was a very hot day on the day of the show ; despite this all RAF Officers present had to wear No 1’s . This caused more of a “monk” than the 1 Squadron incident, fortunately the pilot was O.K. 🙂

Doesn’t much of this boil back to the old problem that the U.K. still lacks any unifying policy on aviation history preservation? We have no “National” Aerospace museum or agency co-ordinating the preservation effort and assigning priorities.
This is not a new debate of course and goes back many years, with a lot of political ( note the small p) baggage still evident. Various factions have, in the past, tried to take on this mantle for their own benefit , hence the anomalous items appearing in some collections, of which some were/are blatant “trojan horses” representing other agendas.
It is just such a shame that so many decent people’s efforts, hard work and sacrifice of time and personal assets ,usually “for free” , are so cynically taken advantage of by those who have other fish to fry.

I think this may well be of an ejection during a display in Cyprus by memory, in the mid 70’s. It is a genuine image from before the days of Photshop.

Yes, there was a very nice 75-80% scale replica flying in the USA some years ago. It was reported in AM as I recall.

Ref. the Argosy being the last AW. Can anybody recall when the Apollo fuselage disappeared from Farnborough? Was it an Apollo or an Ashton forward fuselage that used to sit up the hill from Radio flight in the late 60’s -not far from the Comet water tanks.