As the area aft of the rear spar on a Catalina wing is cloth covered, incorporating them in the design would be tricky and incur a huge weight penalty.

From the video it seems you have a bit of unbalance in the prop spinner as well. This could work its way back to the driveshaft and put a vibration on the pump/motor.

Beaten to it!
Wasn’t ‘806 the one that suffered a ground fuelling era that saw it being ultimately scrapped?

Correct, the story with photos is behind that link. The forward fuselage of ‘806 soldiered on for 10 more years as a battle damage repair trainer at BZN. It was finally scrapped in October of last year. There are two small bits still around though: a galley unit and a piece of freight door (photos on the site).

Do they still carry the names of the VC’s ?

They do:

The ones now at Brunty were named:
XR807 Donald Garland VC and Thomas Grey VC
XV109 Arthur Scarf VC

pagen01 the blue ribbon can still be seen on the photos on the previous page. It does appear faded though in the last shot of that series.

Great photos Nick, shame about those ugly wing-engined ones getting in the frames though 😉

I would hazard a guess at -TEF from looking at the full size photo.

KLM never uses the J in a registration sequence. The Q is also avoided. This to avoid confusion as they resemble an I or O. They do use these letters on other items though, an airplane model bought from KLM will have a registration ending with a J while the simulators at Schiphol sport a reg ending in Q.

Allright, that means that I was a bit quick in assuming that this example is still around. N24WJ is still registered and in the list I posted but obviously I should not have counted it as ‘potentially airworthy’.

I’m sure that I’ve seen photos of an airworthy F9F in good nick in magazines say a year or 5 to 10 ago. Which one could this have been? Or am I imagining things?

Edit: Solved it already, the one I remember is this one:
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Grumman-F9F-3-Panther/0742079/L/
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Grumman-F9F-2-Panther/0916176/L/
and here’s what happened to it in 1996 (I thought it was more recent): http://www.airliners.net/photo/Grumman-F9F-2-Panther/0986772/L/

The aircraft is no longer on the register, damaged beyond repair it seems.

The Cavanaugh one is on the FAA registry:
http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NNumbertxt=9525A
Looks like it hasn’t flown since 1997.

There are 7 airframes on the FAA register (http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/AcftRef_Results.aspx?Mfrtxt=&Modeltxt=F9F&PageNo=1), with 2 airworthy or near that condition (my guess, the World Jet example and the Cavanaugh one).