A fairly superficial answer but I’m a civil engineer not an aero engineer so I stand to be corrected. The Allison, I understand, works well at low altitude (P-40 ground attack variants) and the Merlin works well at altitude (P-51 escort variants). At a guess this is probably tied up with the supercharging arrangements. Thus if your replicas are to be used for air-shows perhaps the Allison route is the correct one. I believe it was difficult to prise Ray Hanna out of his P-40 when he had the choice of the Breitling Fighters so that has to be some sort of recommendation for the Allison.

Learning Slowly…I’m intrigued. I certainly do have a clipboard with a Breitling sticker on it.

Glad you all seem to enjoy the Rapide. As another sometime loader (G’day Feather No 3) we get to hear some wonderful stories from the passengers. One very smartly dressed gentleman when asked if he’d enjoyed said “Sure as hell beats my last flight out of Duxford”. When asked why he told us he’d left in a P-51 but had been shot down, captured and hadn’t been back since his release! By the way the blue one is G-AKIF which belongs to Sir Adrian Swire

I remember being in a briefing by a former Airfield Manager at Duxford who used to exhort display pilots to keep to a reasonable height, irrespective of the limits in their DA, for the simple reason of allowing the folks in the back row of the crowd to see what was going on. Seems to be a simple way of building in a margin for errors that could occur.

A very lucky pilot. With respect to all there are similarities to the Firefly incident last year. It looks like some indecision in a high “g” manouvre. I’d like to see the “witness” marks on some of the rivets after that one.

Is the ex-OFMC Iraqi Fury still operating in South Africa? And what happened to the red ex-German target tug that left Duxford for Booker (?) for restoration for Kermit Weeks?

I agree in part that Duxford shows can be a bit “same old, same old” but as others have said it is a priviledge to see the “same olds”. However we shouldn’t forget that they did bring in some great new acts in the shape of the SAA 747 and the chap with the geese at the September show. I also seem to remember a duo in Sukhois at one of the early shows which was very entertaining.
Apparently Wanaka got 90,000 at the three days of their show from a population of 3.5 million. Pro rata that to the UK’s population and you’d get a crowd of 1.3 million. Now that would provide the cash for a few rebuilds to add variety on the flight line. (Duxfords crowds usually average about 18-19000.)

Pretty much right I would think. I think the implication was “stars and bars” and the “hakenkreuz” are off the agenda for a bit. Have you seen the CF-100 since it was finished. Really good but it is a roundel, albeit an RCAF version.