mark_pilkington.
It was good to catch up with other forumites and put faces to names, voices or posts from here and elsewhere.
Here’s a few photos from the show:
1. JDK with Ron Gretton of the Boxkite 1914 project
2. The Temora mk VIII Spitfire
3. The new 2 seat Boomerang from South Australia
4. The Temora Hudson
5. Judy Pay’s RNZAF Harvard in USN colors, from Tyabb
6. The Hudson’s nose art -as it mows through the crowd – smiles
7. An interesting formation – the Temora Spitfire and RAAFM Mustang formate with the RAAFM/Temora Sabre
8. The RAAF Museum Mustang
9. Jeff Trappett’s Mustang from Sale
10. Graham Hoskings Ryan STM in its original Dutch markings – from Tyabb
regards
Mark Pilkington
all photographic images copyright 2010 from the “Pilkington Collection of blurry piccy’s” smiles
mark_pilkingtonmark_pilkingtonHello Sopwith – PM sent.
mark_pilkingtonShort Brothers “Mussel” Floats as used by the DH60 Moth were / are 15′ long and 7′ 6″ centre to centre spacings.
mark_pilkingtonShort Mussel Floats (as also used on early DH60s’) were 15′ long, and spaced 7’6″ centre to centre
mark_pilkingtonTighars “Preposterous Evidence” didn’t solve zip in the riddle of what happened to Amelia Earhart.
Oh for the “good old days” when “Over-Eager” Proffessor Eagar claimed “truelly you have solved the Earhart Riddle” are listening to Ric and holding the magic bit of scrap in his hands for 1 hour.
Oh for the “good old days” when “Glickman” was going to use his new photometric image processing to prove that the rivet lines on the magic bit of scrap exactly matched the blurry photo of the Lockheed at Miami?
Oh for the “good old days” when Proffessor Janz declared that the missing skull found (and then lost) on Nikumaroro was more likely to be from Amelia Earhart (as long as you ignored the possibility it could be from one of the 7 missing crewmembers of the shipwreck of the ‘SS Norwich City’ on the same bloody island!)
Oh for the “good old days” when Pan Am Heir and one time Tighar donor Tim Mellon sued Tighar for return of his $1M, for misleading the public and him by them denying that Tighar had found the wreck of the Lockheed on the reef, when he could identify from Tighars “underwater hi-res video footage” many rocks to be the wings, the fuselage, the instruments, and the bodies (not skeletons!) of Earhart and Noonan?
Oh for the “good old days” when Tom King and Rick Gillespie would point to the empty jar of face cream as evidence that Earhart (who had freckles) had been on the island (as long as you ignore the similar supplies found in the remains of the British Colonies shop on the same bloody island!).
Oh for the “good old days” when Ric claimed to have found the remains of a finger from a human hand, (that turned out to be the bones from the fin of a turtle)
Oh for the “good old days” when Gillespie found a turd in the beach and claimed it was a crap from Earhart or Noonan, but unfortunately it only had his DNA on it from touching it, (instead of the possibility it could be from a US Serviceman from the nearby US Radar station that was on the same bloody island! during WW2.)
Oh for the “good old days” when Gillespie took an “inkspot” from a poor photo print, and “Glickman” turned it into a enlarged photo of the upsidedown wheel and undercarriage of the Lockheed.
Oh for the “good old days” when Robert Ballard led a 2019 expedition to locate Earhart’s Electra or evidence that it landed on Nikumaroro as supposed by the Gardner/Nikumaroro hypothesis. (and found zip, nuthin, not a skerrick!)
After days of searching the deep cliffs supporting the island and the nearby ocean using state of the art equipment and technology, Ballard did not find any evidence of the plane or any associated wreckage of it.
Allison Fundis, Ballard’s Chief Operating Officer of the expedition, stated, “We felt like if her plane was there, we would have found it pretty early in the expedition.” Although Ballard maintains that the plane or significant portions still exist and will eventually be found, TIGHAR argues that the Electra has been “broken up” by the surf and other harsh environmental elements
mark_pilkingtonThe Short Brothers designed a number of floats for various seaplanes of their own or other’s designs.
They designed the floats for the various Supermarine and other British Schneider Trophy seaplanes.
Their greatest seaplane float development was in my view for the civilian DH60 series that continued on to the DH82 Queen Bee and Tiger Moth etc.
These were first developed for the Short Brothers Mussel aircraft and were hence known as Short Mussel floats.
Short Brothers S.7 Mussel (youtube.com)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> From Wiki
The Short S.7 Mussel was a single-engined two-seat monoplane built by Short Brothers to test the performance of their duralumin monocoque floats. Two were built.
Development
Having demonstrated the watertightness and corrosion resistance of duralumin monocoque flying boat hulls with the Short Cockle, Shorts became leaders in the design of metal floats for seaplanes. The floats for both the Supermarine S.4 and Gloster III Schneider Cup seaplanes were built by Shorts.[1] They had built their own hydrodynamic testing canal at their Rochester base to explore the performance of floats on the water and decided to build a small aircraft to test them in flight.[1] This was the Short S.7 Mussel; the name was a natural complement to the Cockle but also a nod to “Mussel Manor”, the clubhouse on Shorts’ first airfield at Sheppey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Mussel
mark_pilkingtonThanks, yes you would assume that reflects a recent sale post the August 2023 “free” advert
mark_pilkingtonDid Melvin’s Rearwin Cloudster sell?
mark_pilkingtonStatic display DC-4’s have been moved before – surely there is a suitable museum collection it can join and be preserved and displayed long term somewhere?
mark_pilkingtonAs David points out Flying Boat PBY’s are quite rare with an original / complete PBY-5 existing with the USN Museum and an equally rare PB2B surviving in Australia but a further 4 do exist with the RNZAFM having a Canadian Canso that was converted back to pure Flying Boat post war for use by TAA in PNG, while there is also the composite ex RAAF PBY4/5 at Lake Boga, and now 2 former RAAF PBY5A(M)’s (wartime conversions from Amphibian to pure Flying Boat to extend range and payload for “Black Cat” missions.
While the USN first ordered the PBY into production in the early 1930’s it was due to cease production and be replaced in service until the British Purchasing Commission placed orders for the PBY-5 Flying Boat prior to WW2 for the RAF & RAAF.
Without that RAF order its likely the PBY-5, and the later PBY-5A & -6A Amphibians would never have been built and the type would not have become the most successful / numerous Flying Boat ever built.
So I feel its very relevant to the RAF story and the RAF Museum, and ideally should be put into a Coastal Command scheme.
Equally now that we have 3 former RAAF Hudsons in preservation in Australia I would be pleased to see the RAFM example also put into Coastal Command colours.
I certainly agree that when Museums get staffed and managed by people with no apparent interest in or knowledge of the objects in the collection or the types role in service that very bad preservation outcomes can happen, we have seen a fair share of those in Australia over the years, the UK doesn’t have an exclusive experience of that unfortunately.
mark_pilkingtonOf course MIT Proffessor “Over” Eagar wasn’t the only Proffessor to set aside the scientific process of analysis and replace it with the TIGHAR “Preposterous of Evidence” method.
Prof Janz’s “identification” of bones found in 1941 on Gardiner Island (Nikumaroro) as being 99% likely to be Amelia Earhart (partly on an argument that it cant be anyone else?) , it is important to note that there is a bloody big ship wreck on that island that Tighar and Prof Janz politely ignore and his report specifically states that he doesn’t at all consider the possibility that the “castaway” might be one of the 8 missing crew members from that shipwreck?
This is called levitating by pulling on ones shoe laces.
There is no evidence that Earhart or her Electra were ever on the island but each Tighar hypothesis assumes that fact has already been proven and that then supports that finding via this next “analysis”.
Here is an extract of Prof Janzs report summary.
Note that there are 8 missing “male” crew members from the wreck of the Norwich City and he ignores the obvious strong possibility that the skelton of the “stocky male” could have easily been one of those! ie that one or more made it ashore badly injured or elsewhere on the island, and after the other survivors had been rescued, became marooned and stranded as the castaway
Proffessor Janz is another of those “experts fooled for many years” , along with Photogrammetry “Expert” Jeff Glickman and Archaeologist Tom King.
>>>>>>>
it seems difficult to conclude that Earhart had zero probability of being on Nikumaroro Island. From a forensic perspective the most parsimonious scenario is that the bones are those of Amelia Earhart. She was known to have been in the area of Nikumaroro Island, she went missing, and human remains were discovered which are entirely consistent with her and inconsistent with most other people. Furthermore, it is impossible to test any other hypothesis, because except for the victims of the Norwich City wreck, about whom we have no data, no other specific missing persons have been reported. It is not enough merely to say that the remains are most likely those of a stocky male without specifying who this stocky male might have been. This presents us with an untestable hypothesis, not to mention uncritically setting aside the prior information of Earhart’s presence.
mark_pilkingtonwhile reviewing the recent posts on TIGHAR’s Facebook page I noticed their 2018 call out for donations from their 8.7k online followers.
They scored $45 from two people, – those drinking the Kool-Aide have certainly thinned out over the years, no wonder Ric went silent for a while!
mark_pilkingtonHere is some recent footage of Ric Gillespie passing judgement on Tony Romeo’s claims regarding his Deep Vision sonar scan being the wreck of Amelia Earharts Lockheed Electra.
mark_pilkingtonI have been an on and off skeptic of Tighar, and particularly of this panel, – as Monty states, it was first claimed as absolute proof of the Tighar hypothesis, until claims that it was from the L10 Belly was refuted by Lockheed experts, then the second smoking gun came when it was claimed to be the lavatory window patch – claimed to “match” the rivet lines seen in a blurry Miami photo, subject to scientific reporting by Tighar “Photometric Expert” Mr Glickman, who strangely could never get round to publishing that paper, then an attempt to “fit it up against an existing L10 found it would not fit, – it was too big, and did not have rivet lines that aligned to the frames in front and rear of the window, – and Tighars answer to that was “Lockheeds production line had two sets of jigs and that made for different spacings (never mind the drawings not showing that!).
So then Tighar had a sample of the “patch” sent to a chemical lab, along with other known 1937 Electra aluminium samples, and samples from various WW2 wrecks, unfortunately the chemical composition of the patch did not match well with the other 1937 Lockheed samples but did match very closely with the WW2 samples – so that report was quietly filed in the archive without debate or comment.
So then Ric trotted off to MIT, and got a “Opinion for Hire” Metallurgy Proffessor to look at the patch, and to listen to Rics “sales pitch” and after only 2 hours of just listening and handling the patch, the MIT Professor “Over” Eagar proclaimed – ” “the preponderance of the evidence indicates you have a true Amelia Earhart artifact.” (without performing any tests or being aware of the chemical test results)- he looks like he was one of the “experts fooled for many years” – doesnt’ he!
“Preponderance of Evidence” ? – its clearly now proven to have been the “Preposterous of Evidence”
With rulers, photographs and diagrams, he shows where it could have fit on Earhart’s customized Lockheed Electra, over the hole left when she removed a window on the right rear fuselage. “These things don’t just line up by coincidence,” he says. In late October, after seizing a chance to compare his aluminum sheet against an Electra under restoration in Kansas, he announced that the rivet holes and other features were the equivalent of “a fingerprint” establishing that it had come from Earhart’s plane, leading some news organizations to declare the case closed (Discovery News headline: “Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment Identified”). He tells me he’s “98 percent” sure the piece came from Earhart’s plane. He raises that figure to 99 percent after getting a report from a leading metallurgist, Thomas Eagar of MIT, who concluded that “the preponderance of the evidence indicates you have a true Amelia Earhart artifact.” That’s still 1 percent less certain than he was in 1992, when he told Life magazine: “There’s only one possible conclusion: We found a piece of Amelia Earhart’s aircraft.”
Will the Search for Amelia Earhart Ever End? | History| Smithsonian Magazine
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