We were told on Sunday that SL633 was at the docks on this side of the pond.

Do keep up…;)

The Grace family are not the owners, they are the current operators. The ownership remains unchanged.

I believe the Owl may be on the disposals list. Apparently it’s a French licence built example, with a differing undercarriage arrangement and as such no longer fits with the prevailing collecting policy… 😀

With reference to the debate over the colour scheme on the F4J(UK) it has now been modified (after only a couple of days) with a steadily increasing coating of Owl/bird excrement on the top of the wing surfaces. Pretty disgusting for some poor soul to have to face cleaning off, and detrimental to the hard work put in by the conservation staff in the refurbishment of the exhibits in the first place. The F4J is pretty clean in comparison to the state of the folded wing surfaces on the Avenger. Simply unhealthy for both the aeroplane and the humans near it. I’m sure there must be an “approved” way of sorting this problem out. I wonder what the H+S aspect would be if it downloaded its “munitions” onto one of the many school parties that visit this particular hangar?

The Blenheim was flying as part of a feature being filmed today at ARC for “The One Show” with Historian Dan Snow on board (plus a whole armful of go pro and other cameras). The programme should be shown just before the May Duxford show and I’ll try to post a firm date as soon as we are informed ourselves. It will only be a 5 minute feature so don’t expect a whole half hour! The sky was really great today for photography and gave probably the best views of the Blenheim I(f) so far. Glad to see that plenty of photographers were present to capture it. For some reason the Mark I profile just looks so much more appealing to the eye, in my opinion .

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I watched them struggle to start the engine on this Yak C.11 on the morning of an airshow at Duxford in 1984, then later during its display slot the late John Larcombe successfully forced landed it wheels up in a field on the east side of Hunts Road after the engine let go with lots of smoke part way through a barrel roll whilst flying west to east.

Sadly John later lost his life in the first TFC P-63 King Cobra crash in France. A really nice guy as I recall!

Rob

It was indeed a fuel starvation problem caused by the oil system running dry due to the inverted position, this is apparently linked into the fuel management injection system. However what you’ve all missed is that it wasn’t this aeroplane at all. This is G-AYAK then of Anthony Hutton, whereas the aeroplane involved was G-KYAK of Robs Lamplough. Both were of course part of the Fighter Wing Display Team based at Duxford. G-AYAK went to a number of other UK owners before moving on to Kermit Weeks, getting wrecked at Tamiami in a hangar collapse/Hurricane arrival and is now finally under rebuild for sale in Switzerland. G-KYAK was repaired and moved to North Weald when Robs re-located his collection. It appeared at some of the sadly now defunct Classic Fighters shows and then moved to France, TFC and then to Germany

Interesting that so many of the images are taken at Duxford and Humberside.