I’ve just been glancing through De Havilland Vampire – The Complete History.
Without re-reading the entire book, it appears that no RAF single-seat Vampires ever had ejector seats. It was a requirement during development of the FB.5 but the coc kpit aperture was too small.

The Swiss fitted them to their FB.6s when updating them around 1960.

Is this another one of the occasions when everything is bad for us?
I went round the visitor centre when they were building Sizewell ‘B’ nuclear power station. To allay the (non-existent) fears of the locals, they had a Geiger counter and a few items to wave at it. The two I remember are a watch with luminous hands which caused a small reading and a gas mantle which sent it crazy.

Regarding mortal remains, there was a rumour a few years ago of a wing in a Maltese scrapyard.

For those of you that didn’t read the Malta Times article, Glenn has understandably omitted to point out that the paint job was done at no charge.

July-ish 1986.

Two reasons.
Apart from the aircraft one would expect, seeing a Vulcan display at Old Warden was pretty spectacular
Secondly, it was the last time myself and my Mum and Dad went out for the day altogether as Dad died suddenly a few weeks later.

I remember going as a family, not to a display, in probably the middle 60s and seeing the the Spitfire MKIX and the Sea Hurricane just inside the gate. Never believed they’d both be airworthy many years later.

Originally posted by Lancman
From memory, dear old Graham Warner stated that the props were extraordinarily expensive to have restored originally. 🙁

According to Graham Warner’s Spirit of Britain First, the props for G-MKIV were done FOC by BAe. By the time they needed the next set, Lostock had closed down and it cost £33,000 to have them overhauled in Canada.

Ouch.

I’d have to re-read Graham Warner’s book to be sure, but I think he said that G-MKIV wasn’t restorable to fly. This may have been an economic rather than a mechanical decision of course.

At last – ADSL. It’s wonderful, pictures are ever so quick!

Went to London Colney for the first time in years last summer. I used to live about 20 minutes awy, now it’s more like 2 hours.

I was very impressed with the work done on TA122. Last time I saw it the wing hadn’t been touched and very little had been done to the fuselage.

The restoration of the B35 is magnificent. It looked very tired in the late 70s when it lived outside.