A84-232:
“We never used Gannets”

One from HMAS Melbourne…but no idea what the seats were like!

(reminder to myself-I must feed you Oz Canberra freaks some pics of the Butterworth Canberras-pre-war…you Aussies know which war..the one you fought with the Yanks that we stayed out of!)
David T

Thanks for showing those Wyverfan. Tough times for Fleet Air Arm crews the 50′ and 60’s weren’t they, with damned high casualty rates.

My I ask you the perhaps ‘difficult question’…why ‘Wyverfan’?
It was in many ways a pig of an aircraft wasn’t it.? So much power and a landing aspect that made it pretty dangerous, certainly compared with say a SeaHawk.
Great looking plane though! Wonder how one of those would have done in ‘Reno Unlimited ‘racing!

Dave T

daveg4otu:

I found some superb pics of Lincolns’s taken in the 50’s on Flikr by ‘Ikinlin18’
http://www.flickr.com/photos/20762086@N05/

No aircraft in Singapore but they start with Lincolns on Gibraltar. On page two there are some pics at Changi. The shot called ‘Changi 42’ shows the ‘western dispersal’ and control tower from above and you can tell that it was once an east-west runway, as made by the Japanese. Well ‘made’ by the unfortunate British and Aussie POW’s of course. Changi was a site for the ‘big guns’ -15″ guns from a battleship that were to defend Singapore. The POWs were housed on the camp but later in the war the ‘civilian’ prisoners were moved out of Changi Gaol and the POWs moved there.
Our RAF quarter still had identifiable Japanese writing on the doors.

Here’s a report about the Constellation crash in 1954.
http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19540313-2

DT

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Yes I want to see more pics from the ‘glorious 50’s,60’s and 70’s!

CKing, Thanks for linking to the other pics on the Warbirds site.
Loved the Navy Super Connie. ‘El Paisano’ Not the WV-2 version that I’ve already posted here, but a transport version. It has been adorned with a ‘kangaroo’ I note. I’ll do a thread on ‘kiwis and kangaroos’ sometime as they were a common sight…any plane that went near Oz got one! It also has ‘flags of many nations’ on it’s front u/c doors, rather like a ‘Caravan Club’ member that.
The Beverley (with the Hastings) is also interesting…from the time when 48 Sqn had 4 Bevs before they moved to become 34 Sqn at Seletar.
The others are of a Royal Malayan Twin Pioneer and a pair of Aussie C-130’s.
Your dad will find that the scanner picks up dust etc and if he doesn’t have it I’d be pleased to clean them up with Photoshop.
As I said before, I scan at 2400dpi…might be extravagant that but I want all the detail. I even leave ‘colour neg’ set to retain the most I can, even though my pics are ‘grayscale’. I’m sure someone can tell me if I’m wasting disc space…but that’s cheap now luckily.

I have also done some experimenting with ‘hand colouring’ on a couple of black and white pics. Sounds ‘false’ I know but if I can get a bit more experienced at it I think you’ll be hard pressed to tell that pics weren’t shot in colour. You do need a colour pic to hand to match too though.
Your dad though has got proper colour slides, which will need some tweaking…slides from that time all fade but it’ll all be worth the time spent.

Pen Pusher: Any photos from Seletar hidden away?

Keep them coming, we must preserve the past!

David Taylor.