I’d always assumed it was something to do with forward/downwards vision. The form is so strange, with the nose following the line of the windscreen for much of the way, that there must have been a specific function which predicated it’s shape. Could they have been anticipating the fitment of a refuelling probe in the nose at a later date.

On the other hand I suppose it could have been more prosaic – rather than make a large three dimensional fairing, was it just easier to make much of the nose from a single akuminium sheet only bent in one plane and finish off the rest with a smaller worked three dimensional piece. It was only a trials aircraft after all.

I appreciate its your own point of view, jeepman, but why do you feel displaying a postwar variant is wrong?

Rob

I don’t think it’s wrong at all – never said it was – but the turreted version is the one that most people associate with wartime combat operations. The museum have already painted it in spurious wartime colours with invasion stripes anyway (which would only have been seen on the turreted version) as if to undermine the validity of displaying a post war variant in appropriate post war colours.

Just that if Dx is keen to loose the TBM I’d prefer it went to Yeovilton on loan, so as to stay within “the national collection” rather than being disposed of like the Ju/AAC1. You would get the best of both worlds – a more representative wartime aircraft and an example of how designs were adapted over the years to meet new challenges – in much the same way as the RAFM displays a Tempest II fighter and a Tempest V target tug

Although I’m a million miles away from being even remotely a fan of the museum and its’ management since they screwed up the best chance in a generation to see a completed Barracuda on display, if the TBM is to go, perhaps it could go on loan to the FAAM as being more representative of the type used during the war, rather than the post war ASW/ECM conversion currently on display.

According the the Spitfire Survivors book – Volume 1

K9942 = SD-D then RN-D

On the point above, at a constituency meeting in 1954, Churchill admitted that in May 1945 he had directed Montgomery “to be careful in collecting the German arms and to stack them so that they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we would have to work with if the Soviet advance continued” (Source : p345 of Probert’s Biography of Harris)

Would an item of British origin show Met (presumably for Metres) like that?

And wouldn’t an issue item have an A(Crown)M stamp and a date?

Even this little steel ruler I still use has a stores or pattern reference number and date

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