Latest word from the NTSB is fatigue cracking was found in the spar. Seems a bit fast to come up with that diagnosis, considering they just retrieved the wing from the water yesterday, but I’m not an investigator… maybe it’s as obvious as the proverbial dog’s b*****ks. Very sad all the way around, what a loss for the people on Bimini…

Lynn

Tim, you’d have been better off asking if it would be at Legends… 😀 (Cheers mate, keep posting)

And I’m very glad to hear it’s going to be properly taken care of. Good thing Tim posted in this thread, otherwise we might not’ve known, eh Flood?

Lynn

Absolutely outstanding work, Ronnie, and including the F-12 Rainbow is a touch of sheer genius. Damned strange looking job, that Messerschmitt… looks as though I’ll need to find a way to build one, though! 🙂

Keep up the superb work!

Lynn

Not sure if this is the same one, but there was one for sale in Suffolk, Virginia. The serial number is ANAE231 and it was retrieved from Russia. I believe it is the fuselage only.

Jerry Yagen has the entire airframe, complete with the original Merlin XX. I’ve been out there and shot pics of it in it’s current partially restored state… when I spoke with the techs who work there, many were spooked by the history of it (this is the one where they found the mummified corpse of Boris Lazarev in the cockpit)

Hurricane IIa Z2768

The whole thing is fabricated, perhaps some OEM equipment bolted in, but there is no way a’tall that this is an authentic Messerschmitt cockpit. No way, no how.

Here’s what a REAL 109F cockpit looks like, from my site:

“Messerschmitt AG” stamps on the metal, eh? *stifles a chuckle*

Lynn

I think Peter speaks of the intact P-39 lifted from a lake last year; Mark Sheppard did a thorough writeup in a “prominent British aviation magazine” about it, which explained why such a pristine aircraft with no battle damage was found with the pilot still on board (!!!).

No idea where it’s at right now, though… and no, I don’t know if it will be at Legends. >:)

Lynn

Those are antennae for the SN-2 Liechtenstein radar apparatus. Earlier models carried FuG 202 and FuG 212 that had what looked like a bedspring on the front of the aircraft; these dipoles were a significant improvement on that technology. The FuG 240 Berlin centimetric set, using a dish instead of dipoles, was experimentally installed in a few Ju 88G-6s at the end of the war, and would have been a standard fit for the Ju 388 nightfighters, had the war continued. Thankfully, it never got to that point; RAF losses would have skyrocketed as no jamming technology had yet been developed to combat that set.

Lynn

Oscar, you brought up another excellent point, which doesn’t seem to get remarked upon too frequently. This is not an insular community- what one person does can have very large consequences for a whole group of people. If one pilot decided to have a go at an outside loop in his Humbley Page Barndoor Mk V and the wings folded up, every other pilot who owned a Barndoor Mk V would face increased attention from the CAA/FAA. This could lead to further restrictions on the aircraft, high costs in parts and labor to comply with an AD, or even grounding of the type.

Lynn