Best

First flying lesson out of Barton and my first experience of a grass runway. Weather was fantastic (even though it was Friday 13th). 😀

Worst

Dan Air flight where we were scheduled for a stop for refueling, pilot decided against it and press on for Manchester. On arrival an emergency landing was announced as we had effectively no fuel remaining. I was only 11 and thought my time had already come. :rolleyes:

Just gone through your picture collection, impressive photo record.

Love to put in a helping hand, reminds me of my days up a Manchester (aka MOSI now), best of luck to you

Ok top five lets see

Shackleton MR/AEW2 (the noise is :))
Heinkel HE 162 (something about that engine)
FW 190-D (for fun)
FW 200 Condor
Hurricane (earlier the better)

nuts run out of space

If I continued I would include:

Hawker Hunter (for the thrill factor)
DE Vampire (for the seat of your pants factor)

Being a little bit biased having volunteered there for quite a few years I would keep them all and add to them (was not aware the Vampire was in storage!).

My particular favorites are the Shackleton and the 997 Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka 11 (pretty much as I did a lot of work on both (particularly the Ohka))

If you have a look at the article of the last flight quite a bit of the glass has gone to an interesting milky white colour, so much so for a second or two I thought they had been painted over with a protective coat

Ok thanks for the info – I have a bit of a soft spot for her as I volunteered at the museum in the late 80’s/early 90’s and got to work on her a fair bit back then.

I would be a bit horrified if she left 🙂

Checking with my source the remaining five retired with about 13,000 hours on the airframes. WR960 (a case in point had a respar but was chopped into sections to allow fitting at Manchester, which I suspect ruins that spar life) was retired at around 9741 hours on the airframe.

I have worked on WR960 and I suspect that a return to the skies for this particular unit would be an amazingly long drawn out job (not including the type support issues)

If I am right the six AEW’s that were kept in service (due to their low hours, which is ironic now as WR960 has less hours than the rest [9,000 I believe] :D) were re sparred in 1983, can anyone back me up on this?