I have looked back at the threads on the subject of scrapping and find them macabrely fascinating. I used to have a female friend who would watch sad films to deliberately make herself cry. This seemed odd to me but now I can understand her a little more! The most poignant photo is of the Fireflies lying in Failsworth yard with someone in 70s clothes desperately trying to negotiate for them. It says it all: a time when it was starting to be appreciated how historic these planes were but with just enough obstruction from owners/officialdom who were set in their ways to condemn this history to…….the scrapyard. My father was angry that marques of plane that he had risked his life working on had been made extinct and I now appreciate how he felt.

Thanks Mitch. I must get round to visiting that museum.

Location of crash

Do you know where in the Midlands the crash took place?

Great Photos

Terrific quality photos. But heartbreaking! Thanks for posting them. I recently heard from a Typhoon pilot who recalled flying Typhoons to be scrapped near Birmingham. That is my neck of the woods and my family were in the steel business so I was wondering if anyone knew where the scrapyard might have been?

More Beverley…

If it’s true that the Beverley was so corroded that it could not even be cut up into major parts for storage then scrapping it might have made some sense. But that still begs the question of whether it was impossible to preserve major parts such as the cockpit or nacelles. Was the whole plane equally corroded? And I still think it needs to be asked what efforts were made at a much earlier stage to get the plane signed off from the RAF and preserved (somewhere) while there was still time? If insufficient efforts were made, that would still make me wonder if the RAFM is always the best way to preserve aircraft, especially unfashionable ones that don’t draw the punters. Lots of “ifs” obviously! And some of the comments made elsewhere about not preserving “historic” types were probably used to justify scrapping all the Tiffies, Whirlies, Hampdens etc. History has judged the people who made those decisions very harshly!

Preserving types

As someone who made critical comment about the scrapping of the Beverley, please let me clarify why I made my comments. The original question was what additional type the RAFM should preserve. Personally, I would like to see a Whirlwind F-B or a Sterling preserved. I’d happily contribute to a Whirlwind rebuild. But I would rather it ended up in the hands of one of the private collections that have managed to preserve or rebuild unfashionable types like an Argosy, a Defiant, a Hampden or even a Super Guppy (and a Beverley for that matter) despite facing financial restrictions as strict (or worse than) the RAFM. No one has fully explained whether the option of cutting up the Beverley and putting it in storage for possible rebuild later was ever explored. The RAFM was not being asked to revuild the Bev merely to put it in storage or see if a private collective wanted to take it on. And how do we judge what is an important historic type, as some have suggested? Most of the RAFs post-war aircraft have only been used for minor Cold War skirmishes or post-colonial actions – are they not worth preserving? Is a Lincoln or a Lightning really important in that context? Or is a Whirlwind F-B for that matter?