I read somewhere that during the restoration of a Luftwaffe machine that had been built by forced labour in France, a written message was found on a piece of structure..

“Ma coeur est en chomage”

translates as ‘My heart’s not in this’

A small protest compared with some, but direct action was not always possible.

It’s quite true – from memory, the aircraft was hangared in a shed and the Germans did not know it was there. Two enterprising young Danes got the aircraft working, literally under the noses of the occupying forces, and flew it to the UK.

One detail I remember is that they had to replace the wing attachment bolts, they could not get the real ones, naturally, so they made their own.

We seem to accept that the VW main dealer will charge £80 plus an hour to change the oil in our Polo but think that rebuilding the very finest of vintage aircraft should command but a fraction of that hourly rate.

So true, Mark12. In my line of work I have to reconcile labour invoices for work on BAe146’s. We are now (as of 2004) being charged £33 per hour. It’s the industry average, and the work involved in fixing our aircraft is very detailed and requires a high level of skill. I don’t know what HFL charge for their labour to an outside party, but it can’t be much adrift of that.

Of course, it doesn’t cost the engineering outfit that much to employ one man for one hour, and that’s where the sums would add up when HFL are building an aircraft to sell on. But if you were to hand a pile of bits over to HFL and say ‘rebuild that!’ then at thirty three quid per hour you would very soon exceed £1 mil. once all the bits were included. Perhaps they work on an agreed total project price in situations like that.

Like Mark V says, provenance is everything, much like any antique.

Definitely possible, given that the first few expeditions (and a good proportion of the total expenditure) only established where they actually were, and now that is known, it will cost substantially less to extract further P-38’s from the ice. I assume that Epps and co. do not have exclusive rights on the site.

The Forts are completely gone, anything that could be fetched up would just be small reference pieces – although having said that, a mass exhumation of skin panels would generate quite a bit of cash from collectors – I’m sure that there would be thousands of takers at, say, $250 per hand-sized section. Then there’s instruments, hand wheels, all kinds of other ephemera.

Good luck to ’em, I say!

Wonderful news, Frank – I’m sure it will be a great success. And I would guess that your command of the English language will be a lot better than a few of the Englishmen that I know…:p

Always wondered what ‘Stoffer & Blik’ meant!