…maybe it won’t be long before the private collections start looking elsewhere.

I’ve been hearing that same story for the nearly 40 years I’ve been involved with Duxford. Yet most of them are still there.

That one is now in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan.

What happened to the Wurzburg?

Did they go with a new-build fuselage for TV959 or re-use the original in the end?

IWM Duxford were throwing artifacts into landfill on the north side as late as the late-80s. Gunsights, engine parts, all sorts of stuff. And then there is the sad story of the disappearing Hermes tailfin.

It’s not quite as simple as that. With Ryans, there is a lot of paperwork for long-destroyed STAs floating about. Most of the current ST-Ms in the US (and both of the surviving PT-20s, Dave Masters’ and the late Don Carter’s) are registered using the paperwork and identities of these long-gone STAs. The reason for this is that STAs, being Type Certificated aircraft, can be registered under the FAA’s Standard Category. ST-Ms, being destined for military customers, were never Type Certificated by Ryan back in the day. Therefore, they must be registered nowadays under the Experimental Category, which places many more restrictions on their operation than does the Standard Category. Therefore most ST-M owners chose to buy paperwork and identities of STAs and register them as such, in the Standard category.

Mike (who has made an extensive study of Ryan Sport Trainers and their various subtypes, and has been fortunate enough to shoot five of the survivors air-to-air)

I can’t recall the last military oggin rescue…

http://www.ukserials.com/losses-2012.htm

I was rather disappointed to see that it was displayed with no protection when I was last at Lambeth. Visitors were touching it and leaning against it, and nobody was being told not to by the staff. Not an appropriate way to preserve such a unique ‘time capsule’ artifact for future generations.