Unless the Third Reich gave it as a formal gift to the landowners I think it counts as a fly-tipped item :eagerness:

Elements of Paul Rogers’ Hurricane at Gransden are from one left in a ditch during the retreat from France. It was Paul’s father, an 87 Squadron fitter at the time, who remembered exactly where they’d left it.

Here you go. If you really need to know, any original data and drawings will be at:
Agusta Westland Archive
Westland Works
Lysander Road
Yeovil
England
BA20 2YB

[email]emily.weeks@agustawestland.com[/email]

Emily is very helpful, but also really busy right now with the 100th anniversary celebrations, so don’t worry if it takes a while to hear..

No.

Three-views are not the same as factory drawings. They were published in all kinds of places at the time, including aircraft recognition charts, AP’s (you might know these as ‘pilot’s notes’), even magazines. They would be based on official three-views released by the manufacturer. Anything that follows after is either faithful to these or not, but ‘fake’ is the wrong word for any inaccuracy.

The drawings required to accurately reproduce an aircraft are something completely different from such artwork.

Thanks Moggy.

How many sets of factory drawings for different aircraft have been lost at least partially by fire, tempest & flood?
Too many to be simple chance in my limited experience.

Perhaps the high cost of micro-filming and the great bulk of a full set of drawings explains part of it.
But I feel other factors were involved almost as though it was a deliberate decision to remove & forget the past.
Does anyone agree?

The Whirlwind & the Welkin seem to be examples relevant to this thread.
Mike

Interesting.

In the case of Yeovil it does suggest a carelessness, putting the drawings close to the water table. And certainly when things started getting floody no-one said ‘Quick, save the drawings’. In fact it wasn’t until 1970 that the detritus was sorted and the surviving sheets archived, with copies sent to the new RAFM.

But I think it was just a lack of care. C0ck up rather than conspiracy. I wonder how long any bits of paper with no perceived value survive in a commercial / industrial environment like a factory airfield, on average.

Most of the drawings were destroyed by flood in an underground store on Yeovil airfield. Some (very few) survive, I THINK, at the Westland archive, still in Yeovil.