I will go over to Carluke some day for a gander, as Gnat XM697 can also be found at the same nursery. It is a shame that G-CONV lost its props at some point, but it looks very smart regardless and I wish the owner well with their new venture.

I detect a certain lack of imagination on the part of the RAF Museum. Ian Gleed was, oddly enough, achieving a sort of quiet equality of his own. Rather than his sexuality being his defining factor, he was just another Spitfire pilot. I’m sure the pilots of the Bf110Cs he shot down didn’t consider his sexuality to be a defining factor. To then try and spin him into some sort of unwitting, long-dead gay icon is perhaps a bit odd? Sort of like saying Douglas Bader was a champion for the differently abled. That would diminish his other accomplishments, no?

Pride is a big deal at the moment, but I sometimes feel like it is a gold rush for corporations (etc) to try and naively tap into an otherwise unexplored corner of the market by painting rainbow flags on their products. They could have done this twenty years ago, but it wouldn’t have been as lucrative. And, to shoehorn in a cliché of my own, I recently spoke to an out-and-out Lesbian who wanted nothing to do with pride, and viewed it as a corporate stitch up that has helped her little.

Any chance of a rainbow livery on one of Hendon’s Spitfires if Gleed wins this weird popularity contest?

That Constellation looks a bit rough.

I wonder if these parts were picked up by John Hallett? I’ve been informed that he had some TSR2 surfaces in storage at one point in time.

My grandfather had an extensive model railway in his loft. One section of it was controlled, in part, by four two-way switches that were apparently ‘from a bomber’ and purchased just after the war. Unfortunately I don’t know where these ended up, but I think they probably ended up in the skip. Having had a look at Lancaster bomb arming/releasing control panels via Google, the switches look similar. In fact I wonder if my grandfather simply purchased a cut down section of one of these units.

My broader point here is that some aviation artifacts simply don’t look like aviation artifacts to anybody beyond the hyper-knowledgeable, so the risk is that when an elderly relative passes away this stuff is simply seen as obsolete electronics, or similar, and binned accordingly. On the other hand how valuable are four switches from a bomber, or even some of the smaller or more generic parts overall? Plus, some of the reasoning in this thread makes the assumption that museums necessarily handle and conserve artifacts better than private collectors.

It would be interesting to know what is believed to be out there in the private collections that isn’t in general circulation. I mentioned the rumour about the TSR-2 front section in the Hanningfield thread (admittedly the front half of a TSR-2 wouldn’t fit in most lofts). There is the cockpit collection in Rayleigh that is largely undocumented on the web, with no recent photographs of the cockpits and none of them in their current location, for example.

These have been reported on before, and I found the following link quite interesting: http://www.oceanscan.com/sidescan/avro.htm

I’m sure I’ve seen other images of the long striations (errr… ‘skid marks’) on the bed of Lake Ontario elsewhere. It will be interesting to see the model(s) when raised. Presumably they won’t be painted with markings etc?

It looks to my untrained eye that with a few more feet he would have got away with it.