2-AAAA to 2-ZZZZ is a lot more than 999 registrations!

Farringdon in Devon is near Exeter Airport. It was units of the US 101st Airborne division who flew from Exeter on D-day though.

I attended Hele’s School (now St Peter’s) in Exeter during the 1970’s. The barn was in the next field. On a couple of occasions we crept up to the barn and peeked through the gaps to look at the aircraft therein.

A Tiger Moth and Swallow were sold many years ago and the remainder were rumoured to have gone to the former airstrip at Ashton Cross adjacent to the A380 near Haldon Hill (not the old Haldon Aerodrome by the way) to the west of Exeter. I’ve never seen any proof of this though.

Today the barn site is the location of the South West Water offices.

I did have great fun “hopping” the school’s CCF Slingsby Grasshopper TX,1 (WZ828?) on the school playing field.

Maybe not really that strange.
There is a big Airbus factory at Albert and, of course, BAE Warton is close to Blackpool.
Could there be a connection?

There have been a few Beech Duchess wheels-up landings at Exeter over the last few years though.

There was an HP.42 propeller which was hung from the ceiling in the Exeter Flying Club for many years until fairly recently. It was natural wood.
It came from G-AAXD Horatius which force landed near Tiverton in 1939.
Wikipedia has this propellor on display at the Croydon Airport visitors centre these days.

The uncle of a good friend made his first RAF training flight in G-ADGT at Sywell in 1939. Sadly he was killed in action flying a Hurricane over Essex in September 1940.
This aircraft would have helped train many BoB pilots so it certainly does have some history!