New Barra diary is up…

http://barracudaproject.co.uk/index.php?id=27

Thanks for the update

Even by Daily Mail standards that is bad, bad, bad.

Don’t you want to take the ‘journalist’ and bang his head really hard against the one at Hendon? Several times.

Moggy 😡

By which time he will realise that’s a mk V and the Pembroke one really is the last mk I

Indeed.

I didn’t know that an Anson could carry bombs ?

Yep, it started life as a Coastal Command patrol aircraft

If/when the Typhoon goes to Canada, I’m imagine it will go by either RAF or RCAF C-17.

Excellent piece of television. I knew about the RAF flying secret missions in RB-45’s but it was news to me that they also flew clandestine U2 missions out of Turkey. Not my speciality but was that known to many of you?

It was known, Paul Lashmar covered it in one of his original Spyflight programs in the 90s (I have it on VHS somewhere) and in his book ‘Splyflights of the Cold war’ but even then much of the detail was not known – it’s only in this year that the UK part of the official CIA history of the U-2 was declassified in the US (THat chapter had always been redacted in the previous release).

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/

The UK Government still refuses to acknowledge participation and UK documents are still classified.

Well done to Aeropark – I’d imagine preserving a whole VC-10 would be difficult for a small musem due to the high set tail and engines

Bruce, you make an interesting point – the skills required to make a WW! aircraft for example are unlikely to be needed in such graet numbers these days.

Regarding education, my daughter (in 2nd year at High school) has already produced various items in wood, metal and plastic – the latter probably most significant – in what is now termed CDT (Construction and design technology) – the design being as important as they are taught the importance of planning and designing an object, then executing it’s construction using appropriate materials.

To get back to the original subject I have always been slightly perplexed by the ‘we must recover it’ attitude to aircraft wreckage. I do recall an article from Aviation News many years ago where the Renfrewshire Country rangers had developed an aviation heritage trail based on their various wrecks, and had to actively fight against groups who wanted to ‘preserve’ it.

My dad (retired RN Gunnery Instructor & former Engine Room Tiffy, HMS Troubridge, Bulwark, Hampshire & London) still holds that Airy Fairies are “not proper sailors”

In the history of 1830 RNVR squadron, the author asserts that in the years before the war, the RN was staffed in the upper echelons by gunnery officers whose thought on Naval warfare were alonmg the lines of ‘Nelson didn’t need a Fleet Air Arm, so why do we?’