Ossington, thank you for some good information. The story has an even more tragic edge with Sgt Brown being an additional fatality. This was one of those stories that came off the cuff from my father, like a bird hitting the window. We were talking about a bit of history and he described one of the most unpleasant things he had to do in training, which was to identify the body of his friend Szwede, burnt beyond easy recognition. I always wondered why he was forced to do this for a ‘single crew’ Aircraft in advanced training, but never pressed him on it. I assumed an inquest may have required an ID. The context of a passenger and badly burnt wreckage now makes sense. I wonder if the Sgt fitter was there as part of protocol after a major service, or along for the ride. A double tragedy. Thank you for the information, it is good to get more substance around the memory. It sounds like a lot of Masters went in, by your research.

Not off topic, there were Masters in those hangars and Master pilots were there from 1939.

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The pilot who went in at RAF Newton around 1943-44 was surnamed Szwede. He took off in a Master, banked too early and the wing tip caught the ground. I wonder if anybody has the smarts to try and correlate this to official records. I don’t know where to begin to search these records, and don’t have the aptitude for it.

I have some Master documents, a ‘sales catalogue’ and what looks like the draft of an AP, largely dealing with Master hydraulics. These are Lockheed, which are common to Oxford, but more usefully Mosquito, in terms of current know how. I have a Master-Oxford hydraulic reservoir and enough Mosquito hydraulics to outfit most of the anonymous hydraulics of a Master. I would happily donate these to any nutter with money that wanted to put together a flying Master.

There are a few piles of grey lumber that are Master IDs and it looks like there are some key remains to reverse engineer from. Every time somebody says there are no drawings I have found, in time, and after climbing blizzard crowned peaks, fording great rivers and crawling through barbed wire, that this is not true.

I would be happy to assist the nutter to thin their wallet if they wanted an operating Kestrel XXX, so an engine isn’t a problem, although the prop setup might require some thought. A radial Master might be easier. It really is all about building a timber airframe. ‘Aircraft Production’ 1940 shows the Master I being built, with a lavish photographic record, which I can arrange to copy in high resolution. It kind of lends itself to a skilled wood worker in a garage.

So, nutter with some time and money, where art thou? Every pilot who flew a Spitfire or Hurricane must have begun their journey in a Master. It’s a big missing piece in the historical record.

Counter seasonal work is always an interesting thing to resolve. Where cashflow allows you to pursue any aspect of historical aviation work then the most simple thing to do is develop a relationship with another marine engine/gearbox concern in the antipodes, and do their peak season overflow, if air freight doesn’t kill the idea. Buy a business in the antipodes and fly everyone over for summer ! They can’t be grumpy sitting on a verandah with a beer in hand !

If you want regular work that pays that allows you to build a Spitfire in the background and you do gearboxes then look at truck power steering boxes for year round work.

In terms of slowly developing a presence in paying historical aviation work, based on current expertise, then I think there is space for somebody to develop a specialist shop in historic aircraft reduction gear boxes and wheel cases, which are basically gearboxes. An example might be building a ‘new’ reduction box to convert a counter rotating prop Griffon from a Shackelton into a ‘standard’ reduction box for a Seafire. This of course assumes a step into certified work. There are some quite fancy marine engines and gearboxes out there, so it is not a long hop to 70 year old aircraft reduction gearboxes. What I observe is a lot of fitting of old gear train parts scavenged from a number of remains in restoration to get one thing in reasonable tolerance. But these parts will run out one day. There are folk doing very fancy gearboxes for the car racing industry, and all the metallurgy and smarts can be traced back to aircraft gear trains. Really we should be cutting new gears and rebuilding reduction gears and wheelcases to ‘as new’ for historic aircraft.

An allied field is in feathering prop mechanisms, basically a precise gearbox.

There ain’t no money in jobbing bits and bobs which any turning shop can do, unless you have a few restoration projects supporting regular work. Doing little favours for folks, inside a normal business, is a pathway to hell, unless it’s your own project, in which case you can do whatever you like ! Simple things like castings, which might require two casts to make one accept, cannot be appreciated by a customer when you need to charge for two castings, let alone patterning, let alone your management, at tuppence per day.

What you need is a good war to build some regular work. The Donald’s onto it, just sit back for a while !