Wasn’t the SA 80 an update of the original (Lee Enfield?) weapon preferred in the 50’s by the U.K. armed forces ?
We got the SLR instead ,which was a b*ggered up F.N. weapon by all accounts.
Incidentally: Could you strip the SLR and move the selector round to ” Fully Automatic” as indicated -or was this a just a legend?

Then of course there was the game of putting Gimpy mags in them to make them look a bit like A.K. 47’s….. The Rocks went into tears of rage at that one.
I’d be interested in the comments of somebody better qualified on all this .

I find it difficult to believe that the Royal Navy or the British Secret Services would do anything as stupid as to plant ‘limpet’ mines on a Russian warship that was in Portsmouth harbour on a diplomatic mission.

Or , indeed, to choose an internationally well known, over aged, near alcoholic, unfit and inadequately equipped diver for any form of sensitive operation.

By using Occam’s Razor, my guess would be that he simply pegged out and his body sank. After 14 months in the water it would not be surprising, to say the least, that whatever was left being held together in a wet suit wouldn’t include the head and hands. A skull was apparently also recovered later.
The “mission” story (with its variations) that we are led to believe, is disturbingly amateurish, ill conceived (by whom?) and in all probability never necessary.
Therein lie the real unanswered questions of this embarrassing episode -probably not to be answered ( if at all ) until 2057.

As he wasn’t in the SAAF, this doesn’t apply, but… I think unique in the Commonwealth / Empire air forces the (non-Royal) SAAF used army ranks, including Captain, in W.W.II to the occasional confusion of their other Commonwealth comrades.

They still do JDK -as I found out the hard way after making inter-service jokes about the SAAF to an out-of-uniform guy introduced as “General ” here some years back.

Funnily enough , the one Neptune that I can positively confirm did come in to St Eval was the US Navy’s “Truculent Turtle” long range flier, which came in heavy and burnt its brakes out on landing due to the short runway.
The “Turtle” is of course now preserved at Pensacola.

Many many years ago such a tale appeared in the venerable TV series “The Dick Powell Theatre”
The problem was they only had a film clip taken , probably from the waist position, of the u/c going down in the circuit. Thus when the “u/c up” sequence was required, the B-17 ended up appearing to be flying backwards. That was the bit I remembered best as a lad…..
P.S. Looking at the IMDB it might have been “The Court Martial of Captain Wycliff”

[QUOTE=JDK;1183506].

My guess would be it may have had Sea Otter floats swapped over
later.

Could be JDK, I’m prettty sure my information was correct, but as of the early 70’s.
As I recall , the original hulk at Thame had not much left in the way of wing structure.
Weren’t some floats recovered from a kiddies funfair, being used on a roundabout or something?

Indeed its a J8-1. The J8-II has the cheek intakes. Incidentally, they are BIG aircraft.
Enclosed shots taken a couple of weeks back with a cheap cellphone camera -sorry!

And here it is at Radlett at an earlier stage in its career.

I remember that magnetometry equipped Dak in the background flying around the local Luton area in the late 50’s!