As much as enjoyed the day-to-day of her trip; I am very happy to know FM213 is back home and will soon be gracing her familiar place.

very intersting, but 96 spark plugs

Two for each cylinder for right and left magneto.

Each cylinder has two spark plugs – one magneto provides the spark for the inlet-side plugs and the other for the exhaust-side plugs. This ensures that if one magneto fails, the engine will still run using the other.

http://www.airpages.ru/eng/mt/merlin25.shtml

Well, there are companies on the market (Courtesy Aircraft, Provenance Fighter) building their business around buying and selling warbirds. They do it for profit.

They do it for their own profit…not the profit of their customers, many of whom I bet have to sell their investment because it is becoming too expensive to feed and house

A warbird can cost several millions. I doubt there is anybody on this planet spending so much money just for love

Wow! Paul Allen, Jerry Yagen, Rudy Frasca, Howard Pardue, Stephen Grey, and any other of the hundreds of people who have invested vast amounts of money from other enterprises in resurrecting and maintaining their machines for the pure pleasure of flying them.

I see the warbird market similar to that of fine art. Everybody knows the value increases in years.

Fine art does not require constant expensive, mandated maintenance to remain in it’s original condition, nor does it offer the possibility of destruction every time you use it. A static aircraft may qualify, but then it would not have any of the value of a flying example.

….. and with turbo’s fitted (operational?) to boot.

I don’t see the characteristic turbo units fitted…It appears to have straight exhaust just like the Red Bull aircraft.

Great pictures…

Now that you have managed to accomplish clear pictures, Maybe the extra step into colour corection will complete your bliss

I used the colorcast removal tool in PhotShop Elements to get rid of the yellow light.

A little tweak

Shot with NIKON D70S at 2007-08-15

Hope you don’t mind. A little Photoshop to remove the background and foreground clutter makes the image cleaner. A little “smart fix” and a tighter crop puts the 51 front and center

Greg Boyington was a technical advisor and actually appeared in later seasons as the crew chief on “pappy’s” aircraft.

I googled and found this site

http://www.hawkertempest.se/gtemp.htm
Pretty interesting (to me) reading in the Survivors section.