We have now moved the fuselage into the large workshop where it is now easily accessible for welding from all sides.

How are the welds certified? Do you have to use somebody certified to do aircraft welds and have your welding equipment calibrated or do you use a proof load test when a section is completed?

How many museums have a special “educators” site with resources for the teachers (who probably don’t know the subject) as well as a place for the students to explore?

‘Airspace’ at Duxford; the enlargement of the original hanger (except the ‘restoration’ extension) seems to be mainly to do with adding large classrooms for educational purposes.

…actually it is the anniversary of the mass breakout today.

Well spotted!

My ‘suspicions’ about Bill Dean make it all sound very sinister! 😀

I was really commenting about the security aspect of allowing somebody so new to the camp when the planning for an escape that had taken months was so nearly complete. Anybody who was helping to forge documents would surely be privy to the fact that an escape was planned, that large numbers of documents were being prepared and possibly, due to dates on the documents, when the escape was to take place.

With the high turn-over of bomber crews plus the tragically small chances of escaping from a shot-down bomber there would be every chance that nobody in the camp had ever met a new POW before and so I would expect new arrivals to be treated with a little caution, especially so near to the end of a huge undertaking such as ‘the Great Escape’.

Another interesting photograph from Vlielan:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirk_bruin_vlieland/2453491175/in/set-72157602637256230/

I couldn’t really find Vliehors but Vlieland is an island in the West Frisian Islands. There is (was) a Dutch bombing range on the large beach there; probably where P4324 landed.

I hadn’t really noticed the first time I looked but there is a photograph of a Hampden flying with its wheels down, presumably this is P4324 on its way to Germany!

The main question is why did the truck driver not twig the collision earlier?

The answer is simply the truck driver was experiencing ‘Driving Without Awareness’…

…and the collision was so soft it did not wake him up.

The best cure for this, once you recognise the symptoms is to…

…get a desk-job and stop endangering other peoples lives? :diablo:

Possibly, P/O A W Dean is in the POW appendix of BCL 1944 but the camp he was sent to is not listed.

It is curious that Bill Dean was only shot down in January and yet he was involved with forging documents for an escape that took place only two months later; an escape that had involved hundreds of POWs and had been in preparation for over a year.