There’s talk of Shuttleworth’s example being flown again in the not too distant future, her recent move into the collection’s workshop area suggesting that things may already be in motion…

I don’t mean to drag the discussion off topic, but while we’re chatting about Hurri production and service introduction etc, can anyone confirm the story that Tom Sopwith put an enormous amount of his own personal fortune into tooling up for Hurri production? The story goes that he put around £1m of his own money into production preparation before the Air Ministry had made any orders for the type, thus giving Hawkers a head start when orders did come in.

For anyone interested in the Helldiver saga, I can recommend the article on the following link. Yes it’s a modelling article, but it would appear to be very well researched and it sums up the Helldiver’s development and service pretty clearly.

http://modelingmadness.com/reviews/allies/cleaver/tmcsb2c.htm

Where’s the Stirling?? 😀

Well that’s me made to look silly! When I first saw this thread that Stirling pic didn’t show up…

Great model, and some nice pics in general.

It attended Oshkosh 2009 in company with Gypsy-powered Comper Swift VH-ACG, so it’s been active relatively recently.

Being as the discussion has touched on P38’s, I thought I’d better post to clarify that almost all P38’s had handed props. The XP38 prototype had ‘inwardly’ handed props, but the downwash was thought to cause tail buffetting probems, although it was actually the wing root design that was to blame (eventually cured by fitting more streamlined wing root fillets). All other P38’s had outwardly handed props except for the small batch of export examples intended for use by the RAF which had both props right-handed. In the end these weren’t delivered and most were used by USAAF units back in the States.

So it could feasably be a left-handed P38 Allison in this Il-2…

Utterly incredible, complete with original bullet holes too!! I have to agree with what’s already been said about significance, this is the most important type to return to the air for many years in my opinion.

Didn’t understand a word, but a great clip all the same!

The end result would have been the same. Everyone would have sat on their collective ass until the last possible moment without doing a damn thing, even if they had 5 years to come up with a plan.

Well I’m not suggesting that everything could have been saved, certainly the largest aircraft like the 707 and VC-10 would have been very difficult to do anything with no matter what. But in the case of something like the Trident, I really feel more time ought to have been given. Someone correct me if my memory is playing tricks, but iirc it was something like three weeks between the disposal announcement and scrapping. Even three months would have been short notice.

A somewhat manky Trident 1 has since been moved from Durham up to NEAM with alot of hard work over a period of months. Yes, Cosford to NEAM would have been a longer trip, but the Cosford example was in much better nick. A Trident 3 was moved from Heathrow to Manchester by road a few years back (some of the same guys doing the recent NEAM move). A few years down the line and NEAM are having to restore an example that’s very rough to begin with.

It goes to show what can be achieved with a relatively large airframe given enough forewarning.