Hi all, I was doing some research today on MKV spits in Malta. Do any of you clever people on here know if they were launched off of carriers using a catapult ? If so were the airframes strenghtened ?

Cheers Steve.

No Steve, they took off without a catapult – full stream ahead, in to wind and with the assistance of a bit of flap (wooden wedge ‘mod’ to keep them down about 30 degrees if I remember correctly)!

Why don’t they just dig the bloody things up? Are they waiting for the price to up or something?

The agreement with the Burmese Government was signed less than a week ago and the ground is still quite water-logged. Suitable conditions don’t usually exist until latter half of November.

A possible answer to that is that the chap/chaps concerned have never heard of the fora where the doubters dwell or that said fora’s collective doubts, opinions, speculations etc matter not a jot 🙂

The chaps concerned are very much aware of this forum and similar ones.

If I was the commander of a US construction battalion told to bury some unwanted British fighter planes in 1945 I would not want to waste my time digging more than I really needed to.

They were not ‘unwanted’ – the preservation, packing and following burial operations were overseen by RAF officers. Thats the whole point!

Now, I’m not being biased here in any way, but I’m going to come out and say that I think this is the finest restoration (yes, RESTORATION) of any aircraft, anywhere, ever, to date. A stunning achievement by all involved.

Bruce

100% agree – I sent e-mails to the owner and restoration team this morning saying just that – without a doubt the finest achievement in aircraft restoration to date – anywhere.

They’re mostly skint,disorganised always scrabbling around for work and when they do get it they run around like headless chickens leaving everything to the last minute cocking it all up.
With the current economic climate they’re going bust at an alarming rate so they are in ‘desperation mode’ and talk every ‘possible’ job up.

Graham, as an architect I find your remarks extremely offensive if, as it appears, they are general in their nature. If they were not intended to be general, and your point was to criticise those architects you have personally worked with, perhaps you would care to name and shame them rather than tar us all (the vast majority of us work very hard to maintain the highest levels of professionalism as set by the Architects Registration Board) with the same brush?

Was the Spitfires just routine maintenance?

From an earlier post:

statement of MeierMotors concerning the T9 mishap :

Last week Spitfire T9 D-FMKN made a belly landing due undercarriage failure whilest a tesflight. The good news is that nobody was hurt. After checking the ac we can exclude technical failure. The owner, the air-fighter-academy GmbH gave us order to repair the damages. We are looking forward to bring this beautiful double seater as fast as possible back to the air.

Yes, the coloured disc denoted the type of material the blade was manufactured from – this changed somewhat during the wartime period and there is some discussion on the subject here. The letter (if present) in the disc denotes pre-balanced blades that can be fitted to the same hub. The lettering next to the disc was the Rotol drawing number for the blade in question (they were made by Rotol) and was usually stenciled in white. There are one or two posters here who have extracts from the Rotol manuals with a listing of disc colours. I have access to them but not mine to post.

Rotol changed their blade markings post war, introducing more stencilling and a nice little Rotol emblem. Unfortunately a lot of current flying Spitfire have the post war marking scheme but this is starting to change now (see PL965 as an example of accurate wartime blade markings).

Its the (green D model) example operated by the Scandanavian Historic Flight for many years.