Hi All,

A freind of mine has told me that one off the BBMF fighters is at Duxford with ARCo for Winter maintenance.So I was wondering if anyone else knew about this and know what BBMF Fighter it is and if its in for a big overhaul will there be a change colours?

Sorry if its already been posted

Regards
James 😎

It’s the baby Spit, P7350.

http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=84839

It’s either an NF.II or an FB.VI, if it were a II the clinchers would be the radar antenae on the nose and under the outboard wings- both just out of shot!! Perhaps this angle was chosen so as not to include these secret bits of kit?

Needle (rather than paddle-blade) props make me think it’s an NF.II, although can’t say for sure that early FB.VI’s wouldn’t have had them too.

Have a good day mate, many happy landings. 🙂

Apparently did 4 take off & landings on Tuesday..:cool:

Excellent news! 😎 🙂

“The standard, run-of-the-mill curse words were clearly inadequate. Multi-syllables, with hyphens, maybe with a foreign accent, seem to work best.”

There’s nothing quite like working on a classic jet is there?:D

Great to see the progress Art and his team are making over there, here’s to an incident-free second (and the rest) flight.

The big stuff- two R4D/C-47 Skytrains, a PB4Y Privateer (or possibly a Liberator?), a Convair CV-240 (or a similar model) and last but by no means least the one and only XC-99.

Any chance of a higher res version? It’s hard to ID the smaller stuff at this resolution. Looks like there might be two Corsairs(?) toward the bottom of the picture parked by the edge of the apron.

I don’t know about 6m of water, but 6ft certainly. The interior photo’s taken at the time of recovery show, by virtue of corrosion and deposits etc, just how deeply “Swamp Ghost” has been submerged in the past. It appears that she would have been flooded up to the top of the waist gun windows during the wettest periods.

http://www.theswampghost.com/photos/2003/int/waist-right.html

I don’t have Sky TV so have never seen dogfights.

Paul, were the Vincents used as torpedo bombers in those actions or as regular bombers? The only difference from a Vildebeest Mk III and a Vincent was the tail struts that hold the horizontal stabilizers on, and the Vincents were factory fitted with torpedo gear – but all the Vincents that came to NZ had no torpedo gar as the RNZAF didn’t want it, and some Vildes also served with the sqame gear, so they are basically the same aircraft with different tail strut mods.

I hope nobody minds me ‘butting in’ on this subject…

I’ve been rummaging through a few books and websites etc, and I can find no referance to Vincents carrying torpedoes. The Vincent was ordered primarily as a colonial policing aircraft, and one of the key requirements was long range and endurance. For this reason the Vincent had a whopping great external fuel tank mounted in place of the torpedo, giving it a range of over 1000 miles. As far as I can tell the RAF Vincents had no torpedo gear.

As Paul said, Vincents were used against the Italians in East Africa,and also againt the Iraqis during the seige of Habbaniya in May ’41. There were three squadrons in the Mid-East/ East Africa theatre, 8sqn based in Aden, 47sqn in Sudan and 244sqn at RAF Shaibah, Iraq. 244 was a new squadron formed in November 1940 (!) and they were the squadron that bombed the Iraqis at Habbaniya.

A feat mentioned in “The British Bomber since 1914” (Francis K. Mason/ Putnams) is the surrender of the Italian submarine Galileo Galilei near Aden, after an 8sqn Vincent had attacked her with a 250lb depth charge. I’ve found the Wiki entry for the incident, but it makes no mention of her being attacked by aircraft. Can anyone shed any light?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_submarine_Galileo_Galilei