I have just done this earlier today. Stansted Airport to Harlow Town by train, £6.30. Then take a bus from Harlow Town to Harlow bus station (£1.00), theh another bus (H1) towards Ongar (£2.20), get off at the roundabout after the motorway junction & then a 15 minute walk to the field. Total cost £9.50, a taxi is about £30.00 I recall.

Oh, I had read about this book and got the impression that the whole idea was to publish the original artworks :confused:

At Old Sarum five Belfast Truss hangars exist, two pairs and a single.

Good to see they are Grade 1 listed 🙂

Moose was painted by British Airways at Heathrow originally

Seems incredible to think BA were doing warbird paint jobs back then.

I really don’t know if this adds to the debate – but there is an interesting observation on page 88 of the Lucas book

he states “……….although it (Sky – sk) fell from use by the RAF post war, its continuing use by by Naval Aviation ensured that it was retained in the MoS colour range. Confusingly the MoS range contains two versions of Sky, Aircraft Finish 9 and Aircraft Finish 9A. These colours are so similar to be almost indistinguishable to the naked eye. It was Aircraft Finish 9A which was included in BS 381C in 1964 as No 210 Sky”

This suggests that there was variation – and it was sufficiently different for there to be a need for the two different shades to be available.

This is a good point and adds something to this debate – but at the same time PL clearly states the two shades were ‘almost indistinguishable’ (and this would have been with ‘side by side’ colour chips). I would think that the ‘two’ colours, applied to two examples of the same type of aircraft, in all probablilty would have had the same appearance in like for like daylighting.

Another factor this quote introduces is the appearance in 1964 of BS 381C. This is the oft quoted BS specification which included a number (but certainly and importantly, not all) of the wartime British military colours, however one may question how close this set of colours was, created almost 20 years after the end of the war to the actual wartime shades, at least those that made it in to this BS. The fact that the colours that did survive in to 381C were generally those that remained in some service use (the main reason for the inclusion of Sky of course) does support the argument that there was a consistancy of colour value but I suspect the old ‘Type S’ suffix has more to do with the notion that BS 381C Sky is measurably different than WWII era Sky than any perceivable colour difference.

Sorry but this discussion is going nowhere – you claim to see no evidence that the official colour ‘Sky’ went through any physical colour and or shade changes whilst a designated colour used by British military aircraft from 1940 through to the post WWII Royal Navy use. That is your right. Unfortunately the various studies show that it did show subtle changes. Let’s leave it at that.

Well I have been following this thread with great interest and I dont think its ‘going nowhere’, quite the contrarary actually.

I dont think anyone here is suggesting that these colours (and Sky in particular) have not changed whatsoever over the course of their service use. Some of the shades, Sky again being a good example, showed a clear degree of development at the start of their ‘lives’ and they all exhibited a degree of subtle variation in terms of manufacturing tolerance, batch differences, manuafacturer differences etc throughout their use. This is something that Mark12 has pointed out several times on this forum. However it as, as is often the case, a question of degree.

As far as I have learned there was no significant change to Sky which rendered, for example post 1945, an identifiable contrasting shade which can be shown by comparative paint chips, but at the same time I would not be at all surprised if an original section of 1941 tail band, compared with say a 1951 Royal Navy fragment exhibited some measurable diffences. To what extent such differences can be attributed to the factors in my previous paragraph is open to discusssion but as far as I am aware it (post war Sky) was not, in effect, a different colour.

Malcolm, your point about restorers today looking over the shoulders of the so called ‘anoraks’ and being more aware of modellers references is very valid, the main reason being that the vast majority of published sources for finishing WWII aircraft are aimed at the modellers and historians rather than the people who paint the actual aircraft. Today the best restorers are well aware of these sources but it can be argued that there was a long period of time when the modellers were well ahead!

Wasn’t there some debate as to whether the Stuka was actually owned by RLM? The pictures seemed to show one that was with a museum in Germany.

Err yes – the project was not part of the sale IIRC.