Throwing a curved ball in -there are few who would argue that the Boeing 707 isn’t hugely influential in air transport ! However with one being scrapped at Manston there is little chance of a complete machine now being preserved in this country. We do however have numerous ‘duplicates’ in preservation -do we need to adopt a Noah’s Ark approach rather than multiple duplication based on popularity?
The problem is, David, as we’ve discussed here many times before, there is no co-ordinated collecting policy in the UK (or indeed any other country AFAIK). It is left to each individual museum or private collector decide what is deemed worthy of preservation. Availability of airframes obviously plays a major part. Hence we have dozens of Mystere IVs, a type with almost no significance in the UK, rotting into the dirt at some of the smaller museums, likewise a surfeit (many would argue) of Vulcans, yet a relative paucity of Victors and just a single Valiant.
With no overall national collection actively adding to their airframes since the Science Museum stopped in the 1980s, and the likes of the RAF Museum and IWM having a specialist remit, the chances of any serious long-term (i.e. indoor) further preservation of airliners must be virtually nil, since the ‘plague of Concordes’ that was inflicted on the UK preservation movement a few years back after BA’s withdrawal of the type. So we are left with a few Viscounts, BAC-111s, a couple of Britannias (none of which types AFAIK have any realistic chance of going under cover), one Comet inside at DX, and that’s about it. Unlikely that a Bristol Freighter will ever be seen again in the UK, nothing pre-war (apart from the dH biplanes) AFAIK, and that’s about the sum of the preserved remnants of the once-proud British airliner industry. In 100 years, the population will be left to think that in the 20th century everyone travelled in airliners with delta wings and pointy noses, as that’s all that will be left!
Still, there’s a good selection of classic US types tucked up nice and warm in Wroughton. 🙂
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