This thread has touched on a broader subject however, which is what to do with all the wreckage which gets dug up, dredged up, or saved from scrapyards.
Presumably Tangmere sent the Ju87 engine, Typhoon parts, Gladiator cowling ring, etc etc to the scrapyard because they were already chock-full of wreckage from similar sources. Lots of museums, particularly small ones, are full of this stuff, and more keeps getting recovered. Should museums take on or fund recovery of wreckage that they haven’t got any room for?
Obviously some of the results of aviation archeology does fall in the category of “national treasure”. Parts of extinct or vanishingly rare types, as discussed here, can make a real contribution to worthy projects, like DaveR’s Typhoon, or stand in their own right as historical artifacts. I seem to recall that there is a display of He177 parts at Flixton, for example, which are the only parts of that type I am ever likely to see.
However, it’s surely a bit tenuous to display the mangled fragments of another Spitfire , P-51 or B-17, on the basis that they themselves are national treasures, especially if that corroded Wright Cyclone you’ve just recovered displaces a Typhoon centre section towards a scrapyard.
Sure, keep digging them up: every so often you’ll find something like P9374! More importantly, it will be possible to lay to rest the remains of lost servicemen. But in the long run, a bigger-picture approach, with museums selling wreckology items to collectors on a more regular basis, might stop parts being needlessly lost or corroding away further outside, and additionally prove a valuable source of income to be fed back into preservation.
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