The silver and red example, F-AZLY, is actually a Yak-3UA rather than a -9UM.

http://www.airport-data.com/aircraft/F-AZLY.html

Let’s be clear that its not the aircraft that is duff, though late, so another type is not needed to replace it. It’s that we can’t afford to operate many aircraft so we can do without any maritime patrol aircraft…… until the need arises!

Yes indeed. My point was that this is even worse than the AEW saga in that it’s being cancelled even though the end result is a perfectly good aircraft, unlike the AEW which was still catching fire and so forth at the time of cancellation!

Even the Sentinel is going, and they’ve only been in service five minutes…

Well there are a couple of near-airworthy Shackletons they could commandeer! They were only used 20 years past thier planned retirement date, might aswell bring them back to do another 20…

Yes please to the pictures Tony, if it’s not too much hassle.

Glad to have finally seen the whole programme last night, having only caught half of it when previously shown. I would agree with some of the comments about the lack of depth in certain areas, but there was certainly plenty worthwhile to see, such as the interview with Gibson’s ‘popsie’ and the footage of Gibson himself- I’d never heard his voice before.

Perhaps my mind is playing tricks, but I’m sure I saw some extra scenes in the iplayer version a few weeks back- was last night’s show a slightly edited version??

Does anyone know what became of the flight deck and tail unit of the Freighter, I seem to remeber they were still around on the site about ten years ago.

I saw about half of this programme on iplayer a few weeks back, so it seems it has been shown already on another Beeb channel. Looked a decent programme, but by the time I came back to finish it, it had been removed from iplayer- doh!