XN923That post-Sunderland Shorts flying boat that Charles E Brown took a photo of, you know…it was in an extra dark sea grey finish and the 2 man crews heads are visible in the bubble canopy. High wing, four-engine, flying boat.
Short Shetland?
XN923No – the CAA require that there is an identifiable airframe from which to work from. If there isnt, it becomes a new build, and the certification for new aircraft is very different!
Bruce
Seems arbitrary when almost all the airframe may be replaced, but if them’s the rules…
It makes me wonder that if Mr Vacher had purchased the hurricane and had it cleaned repaired and assembled as is instead of a restoration to fly, how many of you that are questioning the use of new material in the rebuild would be crying what a shame it was and why didn’t he restore it to fly?
There undoubtedly would be people calling for that in every case and it may be appropriate, it may not. There is currently a sizeable group of people calling for the Cutty Sark to be restored to seaworthiness and used as a sail training vessel. OTOH it sounds like Peter Vacher has done a superbly sympathetic job. I’ll always tend to the preserving history angle, while others will always be of the ‘all aircraft belong in the air’ persuasion, and as far as I am concerned, Vive la Differance.
XN923IMHO if it looks like a Hurricane, sounds like a Hurricane and flies like a Hurricane, it IS a Hurricane.
Any Aircraft flown continuosly since being built in the 1940’s would probably have many things renewed by now. I would still consider it to be original. The fact that most are left lying around to be rediscovered, restored and reflown is a blip in their flying life.
Two different points here to my mind. The aircraft which have been in constant use since new (say the 1940s for the sake of argument) and those which have been ‘lying around’, virtually complete in a state similar to that in which it was in service.
To my mind, aircaft which are like ‘time capsules’ (Swamp Ghost, for example, or the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s Corsair) should be left as they are, as what they have to tell historians both now and in the future about their life in service is too valuable to ignore. Restored to fly, they become just another flying B17 or Corsair.
I appreciate I may be in a minority here, but I am not particularly bothered if the aircraft I see at airshows are originals or not. As stangman says, if it looks, sounds and flies like a Hurricane, it’s a Hurricane. While there are companies like Hawker Restorations around, we can have utterly delightful (and virtually new) Hurricanes flying around. Do we need to pillage a limited number of historical artefacts? Not to my mind. Can’t we have our cake and eat it?
XN923But the original issue raised by Graham F who started this thread was concerned mainly for the fate of the original non-airworthy material such as the WW2 original wings fitted to R4118.Only Robbo has tried to address this question by stating that there is a considerable amount of original material in store. I wonder how many static Hurricane or Spitfire restorations have access to non-airworthy 1940s materials removed in flying rebuild processes & I wonder how much is just scrapped? I did read in Flypast that the wartime skin of TD248 was given to a static project
It’s info such as this which is of real interest to me and which I hadn’t come across before, so although the general subject may have been done to death, this thread certainly seems to be throwing up some useful material. I’ve nothing to add in the way of information so I hope you’ll indulge me while I think out loud on the subject…
It’s fascinating that the wartime ‘skin’ of TD248 has survived and is contributing to a display. I wonder how many other such projects there are? Naturally, I would much rather restorers used their non-airworthy surplus bits for other restorations and static displays than scrapped them…
To reiterate and expand my original point, if you have a wartime aircraft where most of the major bits have been together since the 1940s, should you:
A) refurbish/preserve them as they are as an historical artefact, perhaps using the original bits as patterns for a flying repro
B) remove and replace the bits that cannot be made airworthy and restore the rest so you have an ‘original’ WW2 era aircraft, albeit as a bit of a ‘grandpa’s brush’ – donate the rest to static projects or build one of your own
C) remove and replace the bits that cannot be made airworthy and restore the rest so you have an ‘original’ WW2 era aircraft and keep the original but non-airworthy bits so that one day when the aircraft can no-longer fly, it can be put back to its 1940s state
I think all three are potentially viable (as far as I know, which isn’t very), but to me would depend on the state of the starting point. For example, if you have a ‘Hurricane’ which is basically a bag of stainless steel tube connectors then doing anything other than A is going to be a replica with a few 1940s components and original in a way that means very little. Even if doing B or C you are going to lose a valuable part of the originality. Alternatively, if you have a Spitfire which is eminently flyable apart from the skin and, say, the odd rib or fuselage frame, then the opportunity to have a gen-u-ine flying WW2 Spit is perhaps just too tempting.
XN923I was wondering this same thing when I read the article about the Mosquito FB.26 in this month’s Flypast. The article doesn’t say how much of the original structure will go into the flying restoration but the implications were that the ‘big bits’ will be all new.
I’m not saying original aircraft should be left to rot where they stand, I’ll make that clear now, but will future generations throw up their hands in horror to think that we could have preserved these largely original aircraft as they are and simply built flying replicas (which apparently we are more than capable of doing) to get our airshow kicks? What is the value of a restoration when everyone knows that it’s just an original data plate riveted to a brand new aircraft? Even if the original bits are retained and used in a static display item? We have replicas of rare types (Fw190, Me262) so why not be honest and have new build Spits and Hurricanes as well, and preserve the wreckage of existing types as well as we can for history’s sake?
I’ll add for the record how much I admire the restorers and how much poorer my life would be without flying Spitfires and Hurricanes etc. – their value and skills are not in doubt, but I’d be just as happy in the knowledge that the aircraft I saw at airshows didn’t have the identity of an original aircraft.
XN923I was looking at Fairey Firefly for the straight-sides, rounded-top one but considering the photographs the early marks seem to have a narrower base and though the MkIV and MkV appear to be parallel sided, they are too tall. But judging these things by eye isn’t easy. Could it have been cut down?
XN923One thing I’ve always regarded as a bit more like historical accuracy than a genuine mistake is in Battle of Britain. During one of the airfield bombing sequences, one of the replica Spitfires takes a direct hit and literally crumbles like it’s made of, shock! horror!, wood….
HOWEVER, it’s known that the RAF built dummy airfields and aircraft to try and catch the Luftwaffe out, so perhaps it’s NOT genuine blooper at all!? Did the RAF use dummy planes on active fields as well?
Daz,
Air Ministry Specification 22/38 ‘For the manufacture of dummy aircraft’. Three patterns were requested, a single-engine fighter, a single engine light bomber and a twin engine heavy bomber. Contracts were placed with film studios and set builders to produce these in wood and canvas and were used in 1940-41 – some were also used ahead of the D-Day landings when they were definitely placed at existing airfields to trick German recon into thinking there were more aircraft available. Not sure if this was also the case in 1940 but knowing the emphasis on dispersal around airfield, I’d say it was likely.
I’m not sure if some replicas were more convicing than others but the pics I’ve seen suggest that they would only be convincing from the air. For example, they did not have realistic airscrews and undercarriage but were merely stood on posts at the right sort of attitude. So BofB may be able to get away with this sort of chicanery, but if this is what they were getting at, their replicas are probably a bit too realistic!
XN923Going back to my Heinkel He100 suggestion briefly, I’ve been reading up on this and apparently it had a cruise endurance approximately 30% greater than the Bf109E and even with a conventional cooling system would have been around 40km/h faster. Food for thought for the Battle of Britain perhaps.
As far as the Martin Baker MB5 suggestion is concerned I think the real missed opportunity was as a naval fighter instead of the later Seafires and possibly Sea Fury. I don’t know if it was ever suggested for this role but the fact that it had a similar performance to the Seafire FR46, wide track undercarriage, contraprops and easy to remove panels for quick, easy servicing and re-arming would have made it valuable in the early stages of Korea for example. Not sure if it was ever suggested as a naval aircraft but it strikes me as an obvious role for it.
XN923There was a fully comprehensive history of the Seafire in Captain Eric “Winkle Brown’s “Spitfires with Sea-legs”, an article in the October 1978 “Air International” which by coincidence I have just read. …
I repeat, this is the best description of the evolution of the Seafire that I have ever read, and it would be well worth reprinting, if that is possible, for the current generation of readers.
I think it must be this article which is reprinted in ‘Wings of the Navy’ – much of the info seems the same. An excellent book that should be in the library of any naval aviation buff.
XN923…unfortunately getting a Seafire back onto a carrier without wrecking it wasn’t easy.
This being the crux – I believe Seafire losses from landing accidents alone during the first two days of the Salerno landings ran at 38%. Was fairly limited for range as well. In the air though, and while fuel lasted (especially at low level in the L MkIIC version) not much would come close.
For pilot’s view try Capt. Eric Brown’s ‘Wings of the Navy’.
XN923Heinkel He100 – startling performance and superior in many ways to the Messerschmitt Bf109, but the RLM had already decided that the 109 was the fighter they were betting the house on. Would have been very interesting to see how they coped in the Battle of Britain.
XN923He crossed the bridge in a Bren carrier with bullets pinging off the side, and swears that the conversation with the US Airborne over carrying on where the British were stopping for tea actually took place as he was part of it.
Worth noting that even in the film, XXX Corps doesn’t say ‘right, we’re over the bridge and now we’re going to stop and have tea’ – it’s the US Airborne who accuse them of doing that. The reason the tanks stopped there was because they were waiting for infantry to come up the road to support their advance – it was a raised, single road which was too vulnerable to tanks to progress along in single file without infantry support. The whole Market Garden operation was compromised by their being only one road to move everything along in both directions. It was indeed a bridge too far in too many respects.
I read somewhere that there was a plan to build an airworthy Horsa replica for ‘The Longest Day’, that fell though due to the aviation authorities saying no to it being allowed to fly.
I read this in Steven Ambrose’s ‘Pegasus Bridge’ – he says the glider was built and the director wanted to fly it over (towed behind a Dak presumably) but the aviation authority said no, so it was dismantled and shipped over. Anyone know what became of it? According to Ambrose it was a complete replica rather than a film set.
XN923The black/White colour scheme was superceded from 6th June 1940 by the introduction of Sky Type S.
All the two bladed RAF Hurricanes would have been delivered prior to this date and would therefore have been in the white/black scheme.
This information is from “Camoflague & Markings” Vol 2 by Paul Lucas
True, but didn’t some Hurricane squadrons paint their own aircraft with light blue undersides (probably an Armee de l’Air colour) before the official introduction of Sky?
XN923However, as has been pointed out by Gretza, these would almost certainly have had the shadow shading of black and white on the underside of the aircraft. So it is unlikely that it is an ex-RAF aircraft.
Does anyone know when some of the RAF fighter squadrons in France started painting the undersides blue? Fairly sure No1 Squadron’s Hurricanes were painted in this way, but might not have been until after they had upgraded their airscrews to VP.
XN923Peter C Smith is quite critical of the claims of tanks destroyed by Typhoons at Falase etc – says that cannon armed JU-87’s were far more effective and that the rocket claims were inflated for propaganda reasons – with 8 60lb rockets being the same as a destroyer broadside, I guess you have to hit somewhere close? what would you take, 15 rounds or so of cannon ammunition or 8 (or 16) rockets?
Not sure about the Stukas, but Hurricane IIDs tended to fire three ‘salvoes’ of two shells on each attack run, correcting for aim between each, and would apparently expect to hit with at least one salvo.
The tankbusting Stuka may have been great on the Eastern front but it would have been fighter fodder in Europe, plus it took an experienced fighter to get the best out of it.
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