Nor me particularly. Slick, polished, no doubt, with the touch of Irish blarney, but all very superficial.

I tend to agree. His radio and TV personality was superficial, so I’m surprised at the public outpouring of grief.

The ‘owner’ mentioned in the South Today TV item, allegedly one Wensley Hayden Baillie (brother of the late Ormond). Once had or still has the stash of E.E. Lightning’s?

Haden-Baillie declared bankruptcy in 1994 and split his collection. It seems that a number of his Lightnings, if not all, went through Marine Salvage in Portsmouth. A quick Google search pulls up the following picture, which looks more like a dedicated Lightning chop shop than a Marine breakers yard!

Google is your friend.

Just popped over from the MOSI thread. You wonder why more people don’t want to go to aviation museums, when you have a half dozen threads as **** as this one?

Does Hendon have the space?

I have made my opinions clear in other threads as to where I believe the Shackleton should be loaned to next. Anywhere up here would be good. :applause: Seems the type is, if anything, over-represented south of the border… just don’t bring up that MR1 that ended up in the skip at Strathallan.

It seems that the Sea Vixen is now extinct. From Thunder and Lightnings:

XP919 was on display at Thorpe Park, Surrey until summer 1981 when it was obtained by the Eastern Counties Aircraft Association, the forerunners of the City of Norwich Aviation Museum. At Thorpe Park, XP919 was displayed on its own island in the middle of a large lake, so getting the aircraft to the ‘mainland’ where it could be loaded onto a lorry for the journey to Norwich would be difficult. Enter the USAF with a CH-53 who picked up the Vixen from its island and carried it to an area where it was loaded to a lorry.

After arrival at Norwich Airport, the Vixen was assembled and over the next few years repainted. In 1994, XP919 was sold to raise funds for the purchase of a Hunter and Meteor to the private collector who, as your history says, took it to Walpole.

The booms and an undercarriage leg where cut by the new owner as he had some great difficulty in passing through a set of traffic lights on the Norwich ringroad near a McDonalds. He had, despite warnings, not loaded the aircraft correctly and this meant the the load was too wide to go between the traffic lights. Rather than adjust the angle of the fuselage on the trailer, new owner just hacked the aircaft to bits. – See more at: http://www.thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/seavixen/survivor.php?id=80#sthash.xV30Ywfz.dpuf