Hi Eddie,
No photo’s I’m afraid, but I did go to the 1997 Shepway Show. You could watch the show eaither from the road above the beach, or from the beach itself. We watched from the beach and even from down there the display was very impressive, a wide variety of acts and good weather throughout. The one display that sticks in my mind is Stephen Grey in his freshly restored Mk.V Spit (EP120), possibly the tightest and fastest Merlin Spit display I’ve ever seen. The one thing I distinctly remember was the Harvard-like buzz from the Dowty prop, I’ve never heard a Spit make that kind of noise before or since!

My girlfriend saw what she says was a ‘Spitfire’ flying over Duffield, Derbyshire at around 11am this morning. Can anyone confirm it was a Spitfire and perhaps which one it was?

Thanks for the quick response Lee 🙂 When you say she uses a ‘mix’ of the two, do you mean the two types of fuel are mixed in the same tank, or that she has one tank filled with 100LL and another with 130 (eg. one tank for cruise and the other for take-off/display etc)?

I believe that the Dambusters Lancs were supplied with provision for a rearward and downward facing Vickers K. It wasn’t a turret as such, just the single weapon mounted through a hole in the floor. It was a common feature on many ‘normal’ Lancs built at this time, and it would’ve been a good form of defence against the German nightfighters attacking from underneath. However, the extra weight and the extra crewmember required to operate it meant that it was usually removed before the aircraft started operational flying.

Ok, I’ll have a quick go at the four ‘mistakes’:
1) The aforementioned missing dinghy hatch marking

2) There’s no repeated code letter on the side of the nose

3) The camouflage pattern over the rear fuselage looks a tad non standard, the green areas look a little too close to eachother.

4) The City of Lincoln motif wasn’t there on the original

Anywhere close? Oh ok…:(

The three crewmen who survived being shot down on the Dambusters raid all had pretty miraculous escapes. The most amazing of the three must be Sgt. Fred Tees, the rear gunner on AJ-C flown by Ottley. Their Lanc was hit by light flak near Hamm on the way to the target, and the aircraft crashed with the bomb and alot of fuel still aboard. All the crew but Tees were killed, his turret being thrown clear of the inferno. In a twist of fate, Tees was usually the front gunner (there are books and articles etc that still quote Tees as being in the front turret for the mission) but for some reason the two decided to swap places just before the raid.

Whilst not relating to an individual incident, I have read about an Avro Anson that was modified by her air and ground crew during the Battle of France. They fitted addition guns in various places, mostly .303 but also including a 20mm canon! The latter, IIRC, was fixed in the nose and used fighter-style by the pilot. It’s claimed that this aircraft succeed in shooting down a number of German aircraft, including a 109 or two. It would be great to have some more information to substantiate this story, which I think I read in Alexander McKee’s ‘Strike from the Sky’.

“Roy Nesbit’s painstaking work on the loss of Glenn Miller in a Norseman over the English Channel point almost certainly to the aircraft being hit by a stick of jettisoned bombs from a returning RAF Lancaster”

As I understand it, the theory is that the Norseman was flying low over the water and was overwhelmed by spray and shockwaves etc generated by the jettisoned bombs, rather than being hit by a bomb per se.