Cheers old chap….you are a star! Is this definitely the right colours for early F1 Hunters? as the green is very bottley!!:)

Yup, them’s definately the ones – Dark Green/Dark Sea Grey/High Speed Silver.

Mark, if you can give me some idea of traffic/bandwidth requirements I may be able to offer a free home too. Let me know.

It would be a linux server running apache with cgi/php etc etc and shell access ok.

Roy.

Roy, thanks very much for the offer, it’s much appreciated.

We are averaging around 3.5Gb per month at the moment and Linux/Apache would be perfect. We also use a MySQL database for the forum, PHP, a bit of Perl etc..

Having said that, and as there is clearly still interest in the site, I’ve stumped up and renewed the current hosting for now and the site is back on-line. That’ll give me some breathing space to get something else arranged. Short term I’m looking to unload the site a bit to avoid the excess bandwidth charges which are the biggest issue. I’ve got something up my sleeve to help with that and will look to put something more permanent in place later.

Thanks again for the offer Roy, I may well be in touch!

Hello chaps,

I’m afraid the bottom line is that the hosting costs have just become too great for me to continue paying out of my own pocket. On top of the hosting costs I am being hit with a monthly charge because the monthly data transfer totals are exceeding the account limits. It’s a victim of it’s own success I suppose and has too many visitors!

The original club founder covered the hosting costs for the first few years, but more recently I’ve been covering the increased hosting, domain name and excess data transfer costs myself.

I have been exploring cheaper options but, due to a mix up following the original hosting company being taken over by another, the annual renewal has come earlier than expected. Consequently they suspended the site without warning until it’s paid. Catch 22.

Options are to charge a small amount to subscribers (say, a couple of quid per year) to help cover the hosting costs, or to abandon the site as it stands and replace it with a Yahoo group, or to abandon the thing altogether. I would rather not do the latter because clearly some folk find the site useful, which is nice to know.

So, not sure what to do at the moment. Any suggestions welcome!

I knew that this one rang a bell but didn’t want to post until I had dug out the information that I knew I had – somewhere.

Last year at the PRO I was looking at the 229 OCU Chivenor ORB, and among the entries for May 1967 is the following:

” The cockpit of Hunter 7407M was transported from RAF Leconfield to RAF Chivenor by Chief Technician Wooley accompanied by a small working party. On arrival here this team spent one week from the 1st May to 8th May modifying the cockpit in accordance with the instructions issued by Squadron Leader J.R.Norris the Chief Ground Instructor. This sectioned cockpit will in future be used to instruct and check student piolts on their ejection drills.”

This suggests that the work was carried out by a party from 60MU, but gives no indication as to whether 60 MU had previously ‘owned ‘the cockpit, or had collected it from somewhere else. Perhaps Wrecks and Relics has the answer?

HTH

Wonderful stuff! These are exactly the sort of hard facts we need in this sort of detective work.

It raises even more questions though. It suggests that WN957 was already just a cockpit section before it got to Chivenor. So when/where did that happen? At St. Athan when it became a GIA? Or later?

1967 is quite late, so where/what was it up to for the previous 10 years? And what was it doing at Leconfield?

So, the updated stab at a history goes like this by my reckoning,

10-11-54 Awaiting collection
24-11-54 C(A) RAE Farnborough
12-02-55 C(A) Transfer without charge
21-02-57 7407M RAF St. Athan as GI (reduced to cockpit section???)
02-04-57 Returned to RAF
by 1967 at 60MU, RAF Leconfield
May 1967 to 229 OCU, RAF Chivenor (modified as seat procedures trainer)
by early 1970s at ATC squadron in Essex (probable, but unconfirmed as yet)
by late 1970s at North Weald
by late 1980s at Stafford (noted in ejection seat servicing bay)
date? TEE Llanbedr? (unconfirmed)
by Feb 1995 at 2445 Sqn. ATC, Llanbedr
by 1998 at Maes Artro Village Museum of Bygone Days
Sept 06 (not 02 as previously stated) to South Molton, North Devon
June 07 to current owner

Can anyone help with the gaps?

Does anyone know why WN957 was reduced to such a truncated cockpit

Cheers
Mike

Mike,

The movement card details, as posted by alvampman above, are typically vague so don’t give much detail. However, I would suggest the cockpit was cut down forward of Frame 14 in order to become an instructional aid for ejection seat servicing. With Fr.14 gone you then get a clear view and easy access to the trip rods, mic-tel, anti-g, oxy pipe connections etc. at the rear and side of the seat. Stuff which is very difficult to see when the seat is in a ‘normal’ cockpit.

There is also a suggestion that WN957 was struck off charge, in fact scrapped, at Chivenor in Feb 1957. I would suggest that the ‘truncation’ may have therefore occured at Chivenor (can’t explain why it was there though!) and the cockpit moved to St.Athan as 7407M hence becoming the (ejection seat) “GI” as stated on the movement card. Alternatively it was never at Chivenor and the scrapping actually happened at St. Athan?

That’s my theory anyway! 🙂

Mark

It depends whether you wish to watch the film or keep on wondering just how good it was. Realistically this is the only way that films of this ilk are going to see the light of day.

Exactly.

Well, there’s one less for sale now!

Thanks Robbo:)