ploughXD163 is restored and resides in The Helicopter Museum, Weston-Super-Mare. According to the history and restoration page on the Friends of the Helicopter Museum website (http://www.hmfriends.org.uk/restorwhirl.htm), it served as a Mk4 with 275/228 Sqns at Leuchars from 1959, and subsequently at Leconfield (having previously been with 155 Sqd at Kuala Lumpur).
There is reference on this page: (https://www.dhc-2.com/RAF%20Leuchars.html) to XD183 operating with 228 Sqd at Leuchars in 1960 in the caption to a photo of XD183, and another taken at Leconfield a few months later on another page – (https://www.aviationphotocompany.com/p863681882/h563612BD#h563612bd) – likely that the two squadrons shared the same aircraft?
ploughIs it a valid comparison?
There is a major difference between the two seaches – the team that searched for Endurance were looking for it in an area where they knew it would be; Tighar keep looking for Earhart in places where intelligent people know she definitely isn’t!
ploughWhat exactly is ‘efficient‘ about clearing up oceans of spam that had been there for nearly two days??
…or has ‘efficient’ become yet another word which has had its meaning watered down by ‘the evolution of the language‘?
How many more times does it have to happen before Key implement even the most basic level of spam filtering and moderator control. Are they going to wait until their entire web prescence has been compromised?
plough“Looking in late afternoon Monday and the site is clear of spam. For an organisation that works office hours, I feel that is not unreasonable considering the situation only began Friday evening”
I am afraid that kind of lame thinking just won’t wash! If the forum were set up suitably with proper access for the moderators to act, most of it would never have appeared in the first place.
“……I can’t help but wonder how other forums with moderators who have proper tools could have dealt with the onslaught.”
Relatively easily I would expect; with the proper access and tools (which are included and made available to mods on all ‘ready-made’ forums), the moderation team can spot the spammers early on and delete their accounts well before things get out of hand. The fact the Peter and any other mods there may still be don’t have access to these things meant that the situation got very out of hand very quickly on here.
Unless Key actually give the mods the necessary ‘teeth’, or the webmaster stays online and alert at all times (including at the weekend), this weekend’s situation will repeat time and time again.
plough“Very good news!”
I think perhaps we ought to reserve judgement on that for the time being. I hope they have a better attitude to maintenance than the earlier owners (and that official oversight is much tighter). Not going to hold my breath though!
ploughOh dear, not the ‘Magic Scrap’ again!
It doesn’t require the use of neutron radiography, neutron activation analysis, or indeed any other sophisticated scientific analysis. When photographs of it were bandied about a few years ago, it only required a moderately well functioniong Mk1 Eyeball to detect that it was not only the wrong shape, but also that the holes were in the wrong place.
I presume the “assumed Earhart remains” referred to in the article are the bones which have (some years ago) been positively identified as being male!
No doubt RG is suffering a depleted bank balance and is trying to stir up interest to encourage further ‘charitable giving’ from the terminally gullible. Shame they don’t ever seem to cotton on to the fact that the ‘charity’ is Ric Gillespie, and not the search for aviation history.
If Gillespie were operating in the UK, he would have undoubtedly been arrested and imprisoned for fraud by now. It is a swingeing indictment of the US legal system that it appears that he is permitted to continue robbing gullible people with seeming impunity.
ploughYou seem to have quoted the same serial twice. Did you mean G-APTW as the second Widgeon used in the film; it is located at NEAM and they certainly describe it as having been used in the film. I can’t find anywhere that gives a reliable definitive answer though.
G-APTW was (I think) built as a Widgeon, but G-ANLW was converted from a Dragonfly in 1957/8 according to helis.com. That site mentions ANLW as being used in the film, but doesn’t give any such reference for APTW though?
I don’t know what was used for the ‘crashed’ example – possibly a specially built mock up as both ANLW and APTW had a subsequent life and are both still around. The descent part of the crash scene was actually filmed with the Widgeon lifting off and played backwards (if you look carefully, you can see the smoke disappearing back up the gun barrels!), and the actual point of impact was not actually shown.
It was a very good film at the time, and I think is still very watchable today 🙂
plough“Back in March 2019 or so the old Flypast/Key forum got hacked…………my e-mail address AND then-current forum-password got stolen.
And that probably applies to all then-current Key-forum-accounts.
How did I found out? Well, by filling in my mail address at https://scatteredsecrets.com . ”
Possibly not been leaked from Key – mine doesn’t come up on that website at all – not come across that one before, so don’t know how reliable it is. The most widely used and best respected site for that type of information is https://haveibeenpwned.com/. My email appears on that one, (in association with what is known as the ‘citoday‘ breach), but I can’t find anything in the list of sites/IP addresses relating to that one that points to Key as far as I can see (but there are several thousand to search through, so may have missed it).
The fact that your email address and forum password have been misappropriated should not be a great concern unless you have re-used the same password over a number of different sites. Best way is to use a password manager program such as LastPass, KeePassXC or Bitwarden. Don’t use the same password for other sites (and especially keep passwords for important sites such as email or banking unique to that site), and do not under any circumstances allow your browser to automatically remember and fill in user names and passwords when you visit sites – they are not secure. Whilst low difficulty/easy to remember passwords may be fine for forums and unimportant sites, anywhere that you are dealing with important data, money or significant personal details, make it as long and complicated as possible. A password manager will automatically generate such passwords and remember them for you (you only have to remember the password to gain access to the manager – again this doesn’t want to be simple or easily guessable.
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I hadn’t posted in here for a long time, but had already been left singularly unimpressed with the new forum layout and lack of functions on my regular reads, but the total lack of any useful functionality and disjointed and complicated editing tools are something else. Dire just isn’t an adequate description. The whole forum now looks (and functions) like a 1990s messageboard. The old vBulletin based forum was about 20 years ahead of where it is now! A schoolchild could have made a better effort of designing, programming and coding a new set up to integrate with Keys main website than this pathetic effort. And I bet it cost them a fortune to have it done too – whoever sold them the idea certainly saw Key coming.
ploughRegarding artifact Artifact 2-2-V-1 – sophisticated chemical analysis and expensive expert examination of photographs is totally unnecessary to discount it as being from Earhart’s Electra. All that is required is a reasonably functional Mk1 eyeball to see that the holes in the “Magic Scrap” don’t match up with those in the repair panel on the Electra. They are not even close.
……..Earhart and Noonan cannot locate Howland Island, they estimate that they are close but they can’t see it, and this is the content of their penultimate (confirmed, intelligible) radio message when they estimate they have half an hour of fuel remaining. Their last (confirmed, intelligible) stated they were ‘flying the line 157-337 degrees’ ………….
I think the “half an hour of fuel remaining” has been pretty much discounted as being a misinterpretation/imagining by the captain of the Itasca – there are a lot of inconsistencies between his actions and account of events and those of others (including reports made out by his crew; the radio operators record of the message mentions nothing of “half an hour”, merely that they were running low on fuel).
There is also considerable doubt as to whether the Electra was actually where Noonan estimated that it was – weather conditions at the time (more head wind than had been forecast prior to the start of the flight, and cloud cover preventing Noonan from taking star sightings) meant that Noonans calculations could have led him to think they were a lot nearer to Howland than they actually were. The poor reception of radio transmissions would also suggest to me that the Electra wasn’t that close to the Itasca when the transmission was made.
David Billings made a very persuasive argument along these lines, which is well worth taking into account.
I don’t find too surprising that someone in another part of the world might pick up Earhart’s transmissions – that can be due to ‘skip’ (as anyone in Europe who in the 70’s spent time listening for US CBer’s transmissions coming over the Atlantic and/or around the globe will know 😉 )
ploughThey won’t all come back together – I believe many of them will head to Germany for events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Berlin airlift next week, and I have seen somewhere that six are to go on to Italy later in the month.
Presumably the US based ones will return at some point on their way back to cross the north Atlantic (probably early July at the latest as there is to be a gathering at Oshkosh), but probably not return as a single formation..
ploughI somehow don’t think the crash that you witnessed was the same one?
The one mentioned in my earlier post occurred in September 1965 when a Scimitar which had taken off from Ark Royal on an engine test flight, had one engine fail to re-ignite after a shut-down, and was diverted to Changi and the crash occurred on approach. Mentions of 110 Sqn appear to suggest that they were only stationed at Changi from 1969?
I have been doing a little more digging about the test flight crash, and came across these two articles written about the incident by the pilot concerned (Lt Paddy Waring). It left him with an injury which eventually (after a fall some twelve years later) left him paralysed from the waist down. An interesting read (I note he refers to HMS Eagle, but other sources state that he had taken off from the ‘Ark’). The second article includes a photo of the Scimitar upside-down on the ORP:
https://www.inspire-foundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Paddy-Part-I.pdf
https://www.inspire-foundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Paddy-Part-II.pdf
ploughPerhaps not a Buccaneer, but might it have been FAA Scimitar F1 XD233 of 804 NAS?; which crashed near the end of the runway at Changi in Sept 1965 after suffering generator and hydraulic failure: https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=160980
ploughPotential sites for Reds identified as Wittering, Waddington or Leeming..
My guess is that Waddington has been included to appease the locals for now – there has been a certain amount of anguish expressed in the area at the thought of ‘losing’ the Arrows to another county.
I would think in reality, it is very very unlikely – they were planned to move to Waddington a few years ago, but increased use of Waddington for the Sentinels and Shadows lead to them staying put. The plan at that time was for them to continue to use the airspace above Scampton for flying/training because airspace over Waddo was too busy to permit it. Not going to be possible this time around as Scampton will no longer be RAF property.
Wittering has a lot going for it – not a majorly busy active base,room to accommodate the Red Arrows and their flying sessions, not that far away from where they are now, and the added benefit (from the point of view of those in Lincolnshire upset at losing them) – it isn’t in Yorkshire!
Regarding proximity to the A1; Scampton is scarily close to the A15, which whilst not as busy as the A1, nonetheless carries a fairly heavy traffic load.
ploughBack in January 2018 a couple of photos were posted on UKAR, in which you can just make out the Swift outside at Doncaster…..
That must have happened late last year then – the Swift was still in Hangar 1 until July 2017, when it was moved to Hangar 3 (this is fact, not hearsay), and it was certainly still in there for the book launch on 18th November, so can have been outside for less than 7 months. In spite of the very smart exterior renovation, having seen pics of the very corroded state of the nosewheel bay when she was in Hangar 3 with 558 and 163 in 2016, I doubt if a further stay outside will worsen the existing damage from its previous 40 year stay outdoors by much at all.
ploughVulcan, Swift and Canberra have been outside nearly a year now.
Swift remained in Hangar 1 when the Vulcan and Canberra moved outdoors. It was transferred back to Hangar 3 for the launch of the book about its history and restoration at the start of November 2017, and as far as I am aware, it is still in there.
Newforest – Sorry for the diversion from the thread topic. Hopefully, G-SWIF will one day be returned to a similar state of beauty as WK275. Does look a long a way to go though 🙂
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