Matt, what a brilliant bit of work with google Earth. It certainly gives you a clear perspective on what might have been the planning for the attack, and what both the AA gunners and pilots would have to contend with.

For the pilots, a logical attack would be to come from the west, low in the river valley, with the afternoon sun shining on the face of the power station. The terrain seems to be too difficult to to mount an attack from any other direction. The logical, if predictable, gun emplacements would look down the river valley, easy for gunners to get to from the shelter of the building, where your lunch room would be. The historical photo shows these afternoon conditions, sun in the face of the gunners. Coming out of a low, westerly attack, you would need to sweep to the right into rising terrain, very difficult, exposing your full underside to likely gun emplacements.

Perhaps they came from the north : there seem to be clouds of dust in front and behind the long dimension of the station, and smoke on the hillside behind consistent with this. Perhaps a bunt from the north, swooping down and up, with a misjudgement of height or damage to the aircraft in the bunt down causing it to hit the roof.

I concur that it is a fuel tank, but don’t recognise it. There would have to be a spray of metal from the disintegrating aircraft in the hill behind the station, no doubt over the years working its way down to the river below. Perhaps a bit of work with a metal detector might come up with small pieces that haven’t been scrapped.

Nice work and generous descriptions of the process, thank you.

Swap to good home

Stan, this is a prewar, no radium, civilian Smith & Sons set that I would prefer stays together and goes into a prewar type flyer.
The altimeter needle has come loose and would need attention, the others are in good condition. Happy to swap if you PM.
Ed

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Sounds good

I bought a folder of war time AS, ARP, AN and AND specifications and drawings.
I am in the middle of scanning them. I have been wondering what to do with the scanned documents once I have finished.

Image Composite Editor looks fantastic – you need to give me some lessons !

What I do to get a result is painfully photocopy each piece of paper onto a standard paper size, eg A4 or A3. Original documents may be in some old imperial paper size that won’t fit modern scanners. I do this using the paper size control on a modern photocopier at Officeworks. I have tried to employ somebody to do this but in checking the work it is, at best 95% accurate, in other words some pages might be missing, text cut off or crucial information such as amendment notes pasted in are not done, because a hired gun is either not interested or doesn’t realize the importance of context and accuracy. At least this way I become familiar with the content. I am talking about thousands of pages, so I do a few hundred at a time on an odd weekend.

Once all the information is on standard sized paper I hand it over to a gumball chewing adolescent at Officeworks to scan at 40c per page, feeding in the pages while texting away. I put post it notes on a bundle and get them to label the resulting PDF file with the file name on the post it note. So I end up with a memory stick with 250 labelled PDF files that I can then load up into a searchable database. My time is not costed, but the direct costs of paper copying and scanning end up being about $2 per PDF, so $500 down, $2000 for the 1000 CAC Standards. 2K will get me a week or two in Bali, so I don’t want to think too deeply about what I am doing.

I thought about contracting out the scanning and file labeling to India, but I don’t think there would be much of a cost saving, and at least with the Australian system I am keeping an adolescent off the streets and a life of car theft and quality checking each step of the way.

So then I thought this information could be loaded onto the web to allow folks to find material standards, as it is critical to safe flying structures. I thought I could charge them $5 for a download rather than $100, just to generate enough income to pay for web hosting. It will barely pay for itself, unless each download comes with a complimentary serve of Debbie Does Dallas.

So really the whole thing is an act of charity, a Jesus walk with a crown of thorns while getting flogged. I think the main thing is that these Standards do not get lost, as they are the kind of arcana that normal people would think no rational human being is interested in. And they are right ! But for all the irrational folks wanting to turn rusty, flaking scrap metal into beastly devices roaring through the air they are critical.

Now if anybody wants to dump a box of DTD or British Standards (aeronautical) on me I would be happy to do the Jesus walk with the box. I am thinking of lodging the searchable database on silverbiplanes.com under ‘materials and metallurgia’.

British Standards do have an excellent library of historical Standards, but each digital copy is 100 quid or more, depending on your domicile, size of enterprise etc. This pricing is driven by ‘cost recovery’ principles. It means that it is not really used, almost defeating the purpose of holding them. Maybe we should negotiate some deal where these aeronautical standards could be listed and available at a lower price, to drive uptake, while a royalty is paid to the Standard’s office.

This same principle could apply to work scanned by anybody else, but the higher the royalty cost, the lower the use.
My core driver is that information should be shared and ideally free, to support more safe, historical, flying devices in the air.
The reward for this is good karma, a currency that can never be debased.

So karmalong folks !

All well worth a visit via the Filton RRHT. Nick

Nick, thank you for reporting, Ed

Gosh that is one big pizza ! No wonder the thing could move through the air. I do love the combination of a biplane with a disgracadio motor grosso stuck to the front. Not until that photo did I really appreciate how many litres that thing would draw.

Surely the dogfights above Greece would have been something to see; less chaotic than the later monoplanes with all their speed and diving surprises and escapes. Men in biplanes seeing each other and using all that wing surface and power to bring awful calculation to bear.

Tonight I drink Vino Rosso to the Falco and the A-74, but upside down so Benito can see me, just to remind him how it all ended…

Does anyone know what the C and E statuses were

As aircraft were removed from the flight line due to accidents or servicing, the flight line code was switched. Ie- there would always be Trainers A,B,C,D,E on the flightline, but different aircraft might be used to make up the complement. I have seen this on other status cards for RAAF aircraft used at Flying Schools, where one aircraft might be A, then removed for an engine change, then later E. This code would be prominent on the fuselage.