Which day tends to be the busiest ? – the sunniest day. We are heavily weather-dependent, but we do try to split the most interesting visiting aircraft between the two days, if we have any influence with the owners at all.

We are having our usual Wings & Wheels Fly-in on Easter Sunday and Monday. There will not be an aerojumble as such, but there will be an expanded market, and aerojumblers are always welcome. Westbeach are kindly letting us use their hangar again for small exhibits, and there will be much more on display than ever before. We may have to put the classic cars and other vintage vehicles into a section of the car park. We always get a good number of arrivals in the Fly-in, weather permitting, and there should be some interesting ones in the static display. The large scale flying models will include the HP.42 Heracles again, and as a complete contrast, a very large Vulcan.

Yes the Manitou in the 350hp Sunbeam, and the Maori in the car built by Wallace MacNair, now in Australia, are the only two running Sunbeam engines.

Also, Sunbeam hardly sold an engine after the War, apart from a few Dyaks. They tried to market a range of engines, but they were up against cheap war-surplus engines, the superlative Rolls-Royce competition, and slightly newer state-of-the-art engines like the Lion, Jaguar and Jupiter, so they didn’t get very far. Louis Coatalen quickly lost interest and returned to his real ambition of building a car to win the French Grand Prix, which he achieved in 1923.

The Norwegian Armed Forces Museum in Oslo has a Sunbeam Dyak on display, but the Museum in Bodo has a Dyak-powered Avro 504K replica ‘flying’ from the rafters. Does anyone know if this has an actual engine installed, or is there another Dyak on separate display there ?

Almost certainly a Sunbeam Cossack, and most likely aircraft would be the Short 320 seaplane, though there were others with the Cossack

Thank you for the reminder about the RAF Museum Arab, Mike. I did have notes about it, but had them filed in the wrong place !

I would love you to have one of those three Sunbeams, Andy, I’m sure you would get it going again, (well perhaps not the Arab). The Maori in the car Wallace MacNair built from scratch is the only Sunbeam running anywhere, but Wallace said the restoration of the engine was ‘character-building to say the least’. He said that, originally, all the con rods touched the bores at the bottom, they showed markings on their flanks, but this could probably not have been heard above the sound of the stub exhausts ! He said he ‘took his hat off to those poor sods who had to service the Maoris, both before and after they left the factory’ The Dyak which flew in the QANTAS replica Avro 504, was the last one in the air. Perhaps you’d be better off sticking to Napier Lions, after all.