Surprisingly the last balcony of the Roof Gardens
lingered on (and often off!) until 2002, and it was free!….see http://www.abpic.co.uk/results.php?q=m+west+balcony&fields=all&sort=latest&limit=10

It was the Iraq invasion that killed it

Bovingdon visit of B-29 44-61679 October 1945 [ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:”none”,”data-attachmentid”:”3631939″,”data-size”:”full”}[/ATTACH]

Deja vu

[ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:”none”,”data-size”:”full”,”data-attachmentid”:3854928}[/ATTACH][ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:”none”,”data-size”:”full”,”data-attachmentid”:3854929}[/ATTACH]
Some doubts

1 The Hobo Queen made its UK landfall at St Mawgan, Cornwall, UK

2 I doubt the story about it flying over France

3 Summer 1945 is after the end of WWII in Europe….Is the sub-pen bombing correct? I thought the next B-29 in Europe was 1946 (correction it was October 1945)

Whilst in the company of those who apparently read these memorials, are the names of those ‘shot at dawn’ or who committed suicide whilst in the forces recorded?

The Heston Airport Yahoo Group has a little material on the neighbouring airfields which includes Hanworth( [email]HestonAirport-subscribe@yahoogroups.com[/email] )
The biography of Charles Hughesdon ‘Flying made it happen’ has material on Hanworth.A central figure in UK Aviation Insurance, he set up the Insurance Flying Club at Hanworth in the 30s, then ferried and test-flew aircraft from Hanworth in WWII. (The most remarkable story in the book however concerns the SAS DC-6/York collision over North Middlesex where Hughesdon records that a lawyer took a ‘present’ from the Underwriters of £5,000 for persuading the Treasury Solicitor to authorize a Crown damage payment to SAS (after the accident was blamed on the RAF York))

The FlightGlobal archive searched year by year for Hanworth should bring up plenty.
On the Air-Britain abix forum it was noted that David Brown (Aston Martin) used to clear customs from Hanworth in his Dove Executive plane as late as 1956 (with Heathrow only 2 miles away)

Is this a PBY wing?
http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=1b0869b40ad2e876

The story was published in Life with a PBY pic (but the collapse of China which Jack Birns also covered loomed larger)
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Vk4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA35&dq=jack+birns+burma&hl=en&ei=P7LiTuKLCoGV8QOng5GDBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&sqi=2&ved=0CEEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=jack%20birns%20burma&f=false

That sounds like it’ll be bedlam.

I knew someone who grew up in a street near the IWM and the locals still called it Bedlam in the 1960s

Well I was a bit wrong, too….it seems to be a DC-7B which suggests it wasn’t one of the original American Airlines fleet (they sponsored the basic DC-7 against Douglas Co. wishes). You weren’t alone, AJ Jackson fell for the D7C graphic trick which Dan Air used ,too and the RAF Museum have got their Charles E Brown BOAC DC-7C pic listed as a DC-7B 🙂
Edit …I think there were two types of DC-7B…. S.A.A (and maybe Pan Am) had DC-7Bs with saddle tanks at the back of the engine nacelles (DC-7C style?) which the US Domestic ones in your pics lack,
see
http://www.abpic.co.uk/photo/1142121/