I don’t believe that Breitling have any connection now with OFMC. Nigel Lamb is still sponsored by them for his Red Bull flying and they sponsor the French based L39 team, plus of course the Connie so they still make an important contribution to aviation.

I believe that OFMC was never really structured as an aircraft owner itself but more as an operator on other peoples behalf. This is different to,say, the Fighter Collection, which is Stephen Gray’s personal collection. You can see this on the G-INFO website as MH434 has a different registered owner to Frankie. All the TFC aircraft are registered to the same company however. How many of the aircraft that OFMC have had over the years that the Hanna’s actually had a finacial interest is obviously not something that would be in the “public domain”.

This sort of operation is quite common in aviation. The company I work for operates a large fleet of aircraft but only a small number that we actually own – and even then no one really “owns” high value aircraft, they are all really held by banks and leasing companies! As a company we charge management fees to look after aircraft and hence make revenue, I would imagine that OFMC operates in a similar manner.

So I would presume the future of OFMC lies with the individuals who actually own the aircraft. As long as they wish to continue to have OFMC look after their aircraft then they should be able to carry on. I don’t imagine the overheads of the company would be that high as all the expensive items like maintenace and insurance would be passed on to the aircraft owners.

Hope the above is of interest, apologises if little long winded!

I’d like further information on the scrapped steam locos please?
Can you help?
I don’t think insulting the entire Belgian population is going to help.

After all, I think this was originally ‘flagged up’ as a problem by people from their own country.

Regards
Andy

Hope it’s not too sad to pass on info on the steam engines fiasco. Belgian has a national railway collection similar to ours at York. There were two, unrestored, engines that they decided were “surplus to requirements” and disposed of them in a pretty terminal way. I believe the engines in question were one designed by the same designer as those of the Caledonian Railway in Scotland and a US built engine from early post WW2 built to replace war damaged stock. Both were duplicated in their collection but were not offered to anyone else. A preservation society in Scotland was very interested in the Scottish engine but never got chance to get it. This was in mid – late 90’s (if not later) I think.

The National Collection itself is kept in an old railway shed in Leuven (where they brew Stella Artois) which is in itself a historic building. It is not open to the public except for a very limited number of open days which never seemed very well publicised. Last I heard the building was under threat of being “redeveloped” as well.

It is another example of Belgian’s lack of respect for it’s heritage at the governmental level, and before the comment is made that it is another uninformed opinion I lived and worked in Belgium for 4 years so am well aware of the local culture and politics!

On the subject of Duxford rumours the Duxford Update website says TFC’s P51C is soon to depart. May have missed this one but anyone know what the story is here?

I have visited the Brussels museum on a number of occasions and echo the comments above. It is a world class collection but sadly the presentation is very poor and condition of some airframes leaves much to be desired (and yes I appreciate that some of the WW1 aircraft are in “as found” condition and deliberately not restored). It’s sad that in the “captial of Europe” they can’t find some money to look after the collection properly.

I was at Southend on the 13th September and the aircraft still had the tail plane off and undergoing serious work. Good effort all round get her back into shape so quickly.

The Aussie engineers working on the aircraft were a friendly bunch and kindly let me have a look around. It’s an amazing contrast to our usual machinery – state of the art interior circa 1975. Thanks guys!

Very good to see that some airlines are mindful of their heritage!

Flying A Services is / was an incarnation of Doug Arnold’s Warbirds of Great Britain collection. Think they may have a few aircraft left in storage at Greenham.

No idea about the connection with Paul Coggan though.