77 views and rising! Anyway, I thought the subject was Dee Howard which might have been more interesting.

I have a friend that worked for Dee Howard some years ago, somewhere I have a Dee Howard jacket with a Learjet on the back

About to be used as a flying test bed for the A400M’s engine, being deconverted at Cambridge I believe

The storage depot for the FAA used to be RNAY Wroughton and they did indeed have a dehumidified hangar in which Wessex, Gazelle’s, Lynx, Scout’s and even a number of Alouette II’s were stored. At the time of the Falklands War in 1982 the Wessex (all but one) were taken out of storage and returned to service. This was still the case in 1988 when I last visited that hangar, with the closure of Wroughton and the withdrawal from service of the Wessex the airframes were either passed onto Fleetlands, Sultan, returned to service or put up for disposal through the normal channels. As mentioned above, there are no longer any aircraft held by the MOD agencies that are unknown, all have to be accounted for and the information is in the public domain.

Just received an e-mail telling me that the Science Museum “Inspired” bid to upgrade Wroughton has been dumped from the list of finalists by The Big Lottery and ITV, even before we are allowed to vote on it! 😡

So what are the four finalists that are instead going to be offered to the great ITV voting public?

1. A scheme to beautify the The Black Country. Can’t argue with the concept I guess, but you can hardly call planting trees on former factory sites exactly innovative!

2. “Sustrans” cycleways. Do we reall need more bijou bridges and painted pavements to appease a lycra-clad vocal minority?

3. A scheme to plant more trees in Sherwood Forest. Err, isn’t that the point of a forest??

4. And a new attraction at the Eden Project. So we can all burn a hole in the ozone layer driving to an obscure corner of Britain to visit it.

What a waste! 🙁

Welcome to the real world, where aviation preservation is an unknown statement to the vast majority of the public, and as a Cornishman I take exception to the ‘obscure corner of Britian’ bit

Yes the site was developed for housing and the collection dispersed, as previously mentioned W&R will list where they all went, the FA330 is with us and is stored in Cobham Hall

[QUOTE=’lectra;1155063]Slightly off topic but I saw a SHAR (ZH798) heading down the M5 on Tuesday. It was on two low loaders (fuse on one, complete looking wings on another) It hadn’t been obviously mutilated and I’m curious as to where it might have been headed, hopefully somewhere to be preserved ?

Bruce[/QUOTE]

I was at Culdrose on Wednesday and saw a RAF mini bus marked up as a wide load escort so I would put 2 and 2 together and say it arrived at CU for SFDO.