When you look at the state of some of the “Spam-cans” and high life airliners flogging around the skys it makes you wonder how bad the Shack is if the CAA / BAE wont let it fly.

Its in better condition than most of them.

Mind you, what do I know. Iv’e only been in aviation engineering for 28 years, and Iv’e worked on “Spam-cans”, civil airliners, and Avro Lancaster and Shack.
And I have to say, I would rather fly in the Avro Marques’ any day.

Dream on people, the men in siuts cant stop that yet, – “Can they”?

Buy up all Spitfire/Seafires and Mustangs and turn them back into pots and pans…….. :dev2:

One thing I wonder about some of these new museums, without trying to be critical, is have the designers fuly taken into account the event of fire? The buildings these days seem to be wierd designs with aircraft crammed in everywhere and half the collections hanging up. If a museum was hit with a fire like that recently in the USA, or at CWH, nothing would be able to be rolled out the hangar doors onto an apron in an emergency. The whole collection could be totally detroyed. I’m sure it would cost much less to build two or three hangars than to have a specially desinged artistic building. And no matter what architects might tell you, no building is fireproof – just like no ship is unsinkable.

What you have to realise is, the people who come up with the schemes have probably never ever had to move an aeroplane on the ground in the way it was designed. They have grand ideas of how to display and position them, but when reality kicks in all of a sudden we have to make free hanging skyhooks, in order to move an aeroplane just so it conforms with “the plan”. While the designated aeroplanes are being moved in, a decision is made to just put another 2 or 3 extra in as well, but make sure you use slip-mats and put the aeroplane in at such an angle as to be virtualy imposible to get out in an emergency without destroying it.
It’s all to easy to produce a layout in picture format, but to put this into reality, takes a lot of skill on the part of the people moving the aeroplanes, and when these people ask the designer how he expects to get X aeroplane in X slot you get looked at as if you have 2 heads, Iv’e seen it, Iv’e walked away from it after seeing aeroplanes damaged just to satisfy some idiots ego.
I can’t wait to see the first real fire threat in the AAM or any of these other award winning museums.
But hey – Norman Foster got another WART put up at Duxford, and the Director got a gong.
Bring back common sense, or is that banned under some EU rule as well.

Rant over.

and here’s the one now hanging at IWM Lambeth (with wrong serial #)

Martin

Ignore the aeroplane,
behind is what made Duxford special. It was untouched.
Now look at it, – a bloody fairground.

The Varsity crashed taking with it a number of people including Flypast’s founding editor.

Are you sure thats the same aeroplane, I was under the impresion the Varsity now at DX was also airworthy at the same time but was grounded after the accident of the other privatly owned a/c.
I may be wrong, I usualy am wrong but I hope someone can clarify this for me.
I was only talking about that accident a few weeks ago with my Dad, he was on “Pigs” as they called them, for years, and one of the quotes at the time was that the aeroplane lost an engine “and it is well known a Varsity will not maintain altitude on one engine”.
To quote my old man, ” I wish those buggers had told me about that, we flew all round the bloody med on one engine and the back end was full of trainee Navs trying there hardest to get us lost”.
Ahh well, trivia moment over.

see ya