Quite a good ‘biog’ of the guy in the book The Flyers by Brian Bridgeman, alas no mention of a crash in France in 35.

As you mentioned an adventurer to say the least!..On arrival in the UK in 35involved in a scheme to acquire surplus RAF Bristol Fighters and establish an airforce in Ethiopia to counter Italian ambitions in the region.

Thence a spell in the British Army before his Spanish civil war service, prior to this mention is made of him being involved in the shipment of British civil aircraft to Spain. So possibly the crash relates to these activities.

Chumpy.

Hi Spitty,

The channels shown in your illustrations relate to the early Mk’s ie I-V etc. As fitted with ‘splined’ gear legs.

Later marks VIII, IX etc as mentioned by Bruce, had one triangular form channel the other being a ‘square’ top-hat section, these for scissor link legs.

Needless to say they are all seperate handed items, pain in the butt to form the flanges that attach the skins, ever changing bevel & profiles!

Also the hole centres that attach the door to the leg are different between the two types. So best check out your gear legs…have fun!

Chumpy.

Alas another ‘no-show’ at Cowes this evening, technical probs on all accounts.

I have a picture of a field next to St Athan full of dumped aircraft, including Stirlings. In the same field there is now a digger and plant training outfit and they have been digging over the whole site for 5 years and to an average depth of 5ft, they have found absolutely nothing aviation related, no shreds of alluminium or nuggets of iron.
St Athan even had a railway from its scrap compound and this included a weigh bridge, so Im guessing any sort of metal that came out of there was important.

Three miles away at Llandow over 500 wartime aircraft were scrapped, very little has been found.

In fact the pic above looks like it could have easily been taken at St Athan or Llandow, do you know where it is Chumpy?

Hi there,
Location is Cosford.

BKL had a rail branch line running into their compound at Kings Norton, this received bite-sized chunks of aircraft, engines etc from all over the country…Don’t bother going to Brum the site long since cleared and built on!

As well as this I beleive that they had a processing plant north of the border, that dealt with the stuff from Kinloss and Lossi etc. But have not been able to confirm the location?

Chumpy.

The short answer in the case of the many engines Hercs & Merlins etc, at places such as Kinloss, Losi, Brackla etc..they were scrapped.

The engines were stripped down to their component parts on site, this to seperate the different materials ali, steel, phos bronze etc. The material carted away and smelted down.

A good article on the subject to be found in the January 2004 edition of Aeroplane.

Cheers. Chumpy.

Said machine departed Airframe Assemblies on the Isle of Wight yesterday July 9th, enroute to HFL at Duxford.

…thought some of you DX guys would have spotted it by now!

Chumpy.

Is this the Mk1?.. taken at Sandown a couple of weeks back.

Chumpy