Interesting to see another poor aircraft burnt as the easiest way of “getting rid of that old rubbish”.Stan

It is a shame that so many old aircraft got burnt but you have to remember that times have changed.
In those days it wasn’t too hard to acquire another rough Magister which could be restored to static condition as few people were prepared to invest money in curing the glue problems associated with many old wooden aeroplanes which, even after restoration were worth very little money.
The wings of IDF were so rotten that the ply disintegrated as we touched it and the fuselage was completely broken in half and a short section behind the cockpit was completely missing. In those days – 45 plus years ago – no preservation group would have considered it to be a viable restoration partly due to a lack of facilities to carry out a full restoration and partly because there were many projects around which could be acquired cheaply that needed a lot less work. We should also remember that with no internet there was less exchange of information and expertise between groups to help with any restoration and the chances of acquiring drawings were very small.
I admire anyone who has the time money and dedication to rescue “basket cases” such as the aircraft you own. Sorry but I don’t have any leads on Magister parts. All I managed to recue from IDF was a small piece of faric from the cockpit area which I still treasure as one of the few souvenirs of the time I spent as a teenager at the Southend museum.

I must admit I got a bit despondent when the paperwork issues started getting complicated but great to see things moving at last and good to know that the forum made a fairly significant contribution to the the survival of EJD.

Yes, it was recovered a couple of days after the accident. The floats were ripped off, the left wing was split spanwise between the spars and the rear monocoque fuselage had broken away from the forward fuselage steel frames. It is also said that the magnesium components of the Mercury engine had partially disolved. In short, it was a total wreck

Sorry only just got back to this thread as it got buried.
Thanks for the reply – Looks like I don’t need to contact TIGHAR after all!

Have to agree with the remarks about volunters.
I know it was a long time ago but once the Southend museum opened the volunteers were made to feel unwelcome and there was llittle attempt to give them anything to do. A sensible idea might have been to give us our own project to work on. There were several unloved airframes laying around at that time so they could have made one of them the volunteers project. We would have felt wanted and we would have been encouraged by seeing the airframe progress as we worked our way through the rebuild. Little encouragement meant that the volunteer numbers tailed off and ultimately the management at that time chose the opposite route and banned us from the building altogether!
Shop stock is a difficult one. There is no doubt that you do need some of the “touristy” items and something for the children (cheap diecast aeroplanes usually go down well along with your own museum postcards of some of the exhibits which can be bought cheaply in small quantities if you know where to buy).
I do think you have to be careful with the items aimed at the enthusiast market such as kits or diecast scale models. As others have said there are plenty of dealers who will sell these at a discount and having been in that trade for 25+ years I still haven’t worked out how some of them make any profit.
My advice would be keep kits etc to aircraft which are relevant to the museum as this will fuel more impulse buys. If you have built kits on display then lay out the kit parts alongside so that the buyer can see what they are getting. If you can commission your own unique decals to build the actual aircraft you have on display then all the better. You also have the option of selling the decal pack seperately to enthusiasts – not as lucrative as selling a kit as well but better than nothing.
Don’t get your local IPMS champion to build the kits to exhibition standard. The built kits need to look good but equally they need to plant the idea in the visitors mind that they could build one to the same standard if they spent a few evenings working away at home.
Above all when buying stock never fall into the trap of buying what YOU like. You have to think along the lines of I really like that but will others like it and will they be prepared to pay the correct retail price for it. If you think you will need to discount to sell then forget it because model trade margins don’t make discounts viable – A 10% discount on the retail price means you are giving away roughly one third of your profit. The only way many of the larger retail outfits that discount survive is by turning over huge quantities of stock which requires huge capital investment and unless you have massive financial clout buying big quantities of one poor seller could finish your business.

I know G-AIWA had a landing accident in France in 1989, but I am quite shocked to see G-INFO lists it as ‘destroyed’. I thought it was going to be brought back to the UK and get rebuilt?

I think there was a thread a while ago that covered this. G-AIWA had a landing accident at La Ferte Alais and I think it landed up rotting away in a gap between the hangars alongside various Harvard fuselages and parts.

Having looked at the survivors list the parts of G-ANZJ are shown as owned by Paul Raymond but I believe he sold her on (when the Whitehall Museum closed) to Trent Aero who had bought her with a view to a rebuild to fly but found the airframe was so bad that they removed the engine and burnt the rest.

The Demon would make a fantastic addition to the Shuttleworth Collection but to a member of the non-enthusiast public it looks very much like the Hind. Although it seems (to me) a bit at odds with most of the current collection the Wildcat makes sense from the point of view of adding to the the aircraft available which can display in stronger winds.
In an ideal world they would have both but I wouldn’t have thought that was too likely. At least we have seen the demon hangared and displayed there for a while.

I have looked at some of the links posted here to try to gain an understanding of exactlly what happened and why. It was a tragedy in that many spectators who were simply enjoying their chosen sport either paid with their lives or suffered injuries that in some cases will have a profound effect on the rest of their lives.
We also lost a great pilot along with an aeroplane with a long air race history.
I feel that I have been able to gain a fairly comprehensive understanding of what happened and the likely cause from the links and discussions here and there doesn’t seem much to be gained by looking any further.
It seems to me that no amount of safety precautions other than moving the crowd line back so far that the aircraft would be tiny dots in the distance could have reduced or prevented the loss of life and injuries in this accident
Race pilots accept a certain degree of risk when they step into the cockpit but it doesn’t make the loss of one of them any less sad. Equally no one attends an airshow and expects to be involved in an accident.
I think we should pay our respects to all those who died, spare a thought for those who have potentially life changing injuries and await the official report.

It always amazes me how often members of the forum must stand shoulder to shoulder at an event but have no way of knowing that they have read each others posts online. I was sat all alone at the left hand end of the flightline for much of the day as my knee was playing up so I couldn’t walk about a lot. We must have been yards from each other when you took the photos of the Fokker replica.