Was quite a pleasant surprise to go for a walk in my lunch hour down Hills Road in Cambridge, hear a familiar rumble and look up to see her in the sunshine. People are so used to Hercs etc. coming in and out of Marshalls that nobody else looked up – I felt like shouting and pointing!

It’s an Air Ministry Rim Wound clock, of the “Spitfire type”. Whether the accompanying blurb makes you feel it’s worth a punt is up to you!

Yes, I know what you mean 😀 I know there’s no chance of linking this to any aircraft or incident, I was wondering what the going rate for an item in this condition and with no provable link to any history might be.

Starfighter aerodynamic test-bed?

Re the AW wing – I guess ‘low-drag’ was a relative concept..

I’ve seen a photo of this Hurri in Keys Hurricane salute bookazine, has anyone got any more photos of it or illustrations of it in plan form? The photo in the book dosn’t show the shape of the wing.:confused:

Here’s a couple of photos of a poor copy of the Armstrong Whitworth GA plans, showing the aerofoil section (upside down – sorry) – the thickest point really is a long way back! Also the tip profile in plan and section – you can just about make out the faint lines marked ‘production hurricane’, which highlight the differences.

In terms of straightforward performance, there were various comparitive trials conducted by the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) and the Aeroplane and Armoument Experimental Establishment (A & AEE) during the war. The results of these are widely published in the better books on the individual aircraft types.

Some of the A & AEE trials, as well as those of the AFDU, pitted two aircraft in a ‘combat situation’ to enable tactics to emerge (though this tended to happen towards the end of the war, not at the time of the BoB)

An example of some of the results, in this case 109E v Spitfire I, is at http://www.spitfireperformance.com/spit1vrs109e.html

An AFDU report from later on is at http://www.kurfurst.org/Tactical_trials/109F2_UK/109F2_ES906_AFDU.html

Hope this helps!

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1943/1943%20-%201433.html

This is part of an article about bomber gunner training, but the drogue target and method are the same as would be used for fighter gunnery training.

First car – 1969 Vauxhall Viva Estate. It was 1987, I was 17, and it was too young to be a ‘classic’ and too old to be cool. It cost 30 quid. The plan was for four of us to take it round Europe – only two problems: 1) no driving licences and 2) completely mashed and seized clutch. The school very kindly let us keep it in the 6th form car park while we spent several weekends underneath it. (Just realised this sounds like a public-school jape – it wasn’t, this was a comp).

Finally, it made it 30 feet from the gate on its first post-rebuild test flight, when the engine fell out. .

Second car almost twenty years later! My beloved ‘nesting’ Focus. It decided it wanted to sit in a tree – many feet up – a couple of years ago. The AA man said he’d never seen anyone do THAT before, he was very impressed. I’ve kept the dents as a talking point..

1 – Idiot secretaries that call themselves Personal Assistants and think they are being paid solely to not put any calls through.

2 – Idiot cold calling companies who think they can sell stuff over the phone, making a silly time-wasting game of the whole ‘phoning people up’ thing, and causing ‘1’ above..

3 – Cambridge cyclists who believe that bike clips grant them magical protection from the ton of moving metal that they happily swing out in front of.

4 – People who think the past is irrelevant because ‘we’re all different now’. Only the terminally stupid fail to learn from mistakes, and yet amnesia seems to be at the heart of UK politics.

5 – People who claim that moving other people’s money around for personal profit is somehow useful to society in any way whatsoever.