This clashes with the aircraft fair at Luton. Given how few aviation events are held, might it not be possible to ensure this doesn’t happen in future? I know the events are of different character, but surely it can’t be helpful for either event to have a clash of dates? Wouldn’t have been that difficult to have one on a saturday and one on a sunday – which might encourage northern sellers to make a weekend of it.

Yep sorry the ‘Super’ bit shouldn’t have been there, also known as the Conroy Skymonster.
So is it really the only surviving Canadair CL-44, does that include Yukons aswel?

The last Yukon lingered on at Guyaquil until a couple of years ago. Canadian AF museum wanted to recover it – only needed a realitvely small amount of money (C$200k I think) but no intrest in rescuing the largest aircraft ever built in Canada. Pathetic, really, considering the amount spent on WW2 aircraft. Result? Yukon scrapped in late 2009.

The other suvivors (in Africa mainly) appear have met a similar fate, including one that survived in Libya until not long ago. Who knows – it might surface now. There was also one that landed intact in the desert somewhere and is probably still there.

I believe the Skymonster is going to Speyer in Germany – and it’s going to fly there. Fingers crossed – otherwise the CL-44 is heading for extinction 🙁

>>I guess many decades ago there were men stood around tutting in an English pub about how people had begun calling motorised charabancs “coaches”, confusing them with the horsedrawn contraptions of their youth…<<

Nice thought, but that’s not what would have happened.

Early motorised coaches were called motor-coaches, to make that very distinction. Eventually the motor- prefix was lost as it became superfluous, and horse-drawn coaches faded from memory.

A motor-coach is a different type of vehicle to a charabanc, which is essentially a large car with bench seats, accessible via individual doors for each row.

You’d really only use charabanc if you encountered an actual charabanc!

There is a plan to relocate the Wellington hangar, which would reopen the finishing straight of the old racing circuit. And I’ve seen plans for a big hangar for all the airliners, though funding clearly is an issue.

There, ladies and gentlemen, are the dangers of idle speculation. Thanks for the calm response, Dropshort105!

Why do you need so much insurance? Outsize loads are moved every day – with very few incidents. Sounds like a racket to me.

So would I, Cees. Restoring the Hermes to a full airframe would be a very worthwhile exercise. Weren’t some undercarrage parts recovered from the Sahara a while back?

Sorry, but it’s hardly “essentially scrap” from the point of view of creating a static restoration.

I thought that was the plan – restore it for display at Duxford.