Yes, the Sea Vixen is still a runner! Small, incremetal amounts of work have been carried out on her over the past couple of years. We really need fuel for her now to continue to keep those Avon 208s blasting away though. We intend to run the Vixen a few times this year (Assuming the fuel situation can be resolved).

At the risk of appearing to be a clone of Seaking93! Exactly the same arrangement would be used by us. In fact we had a major article in FP a few months ago. Again coming to some arrangement for either a donation or a fee has been no problem with sensible, enthusiastic photographers and if they are really commercially aware understand that such arrangements benefit both parties.

PDS, does this present you with a problem?

TMN,

Very glad to hear that you enjoyed your visit. As you can see we are actively working on the aircraft to bring more into running condition as well as improving their general well being. The gentleman who showed you around would have been Ted. The Lightning is not ready for engines yet, it will be some before the prospect of runs are close. We are currently estimating about 18 months. Watch out for a major new update to the Lightning web pages in the very near future! Written by the engineers working on ZF579.

David,

In my experience when showing youngsters of the “playstation generation” around our aircraft they are somewhat awed. It is suddenly very different when you can see the size of even a relatively small airframe and touch hard, cold metal. Eyes are opened and most can clearly see that there is little or no relation to the computer generated kind. I can only hope that this impression lasts, because if we can capture just a few of these “hearts and minds” then we are setting up a chance of ensuring the future for many of these aircraft. I certainly see repeat visits and from many a real interest in the aircraft. So perhaps we should not dismiss the younger generations so lightly.

VP967 at Redhill is very close to being ready to ground run.

This airframe has had many man hours work on it and externally has been completely restored. Work on the interior is on-going. This Dove is owned by Kevin and Daniel Hunt and they have spent much time and money on this restoration.

I can confirm that Harrrier two seater in RN colours XW268 is still in a yard in a corner of Sussex. (Saw it a couple of weeks agao) It not a scrap yard however and is owned by a company that “spares recovers” Harrrier, Jaguar and other ex Military jets. It is just about recoverable though if much more of it disapears or she is not moved soon (i.e in the next six months) it will be too late.

At Gatwick Aviation Museum we have three Percival Prince type derivatives.
One Pembroke and two Sea Prince T1’s. One of the Sea Princes has just been restored to a taxiable condition. In fact a couple of weeks ago it was trundled down our short grass strip and managed to get back! Pictures of this event will soon be added to the web site. There are a couple of pictures of the interior of this aircraft taken a week or so before the taxi. We will soon begin a in-depth survey of the the Pembroke with a view to repeating the work carried out on the Prince, the objective being to put her into a taxiable state next year. There is a Pembroke in the US which is due to fly very soon, maybe this month.

Some “small” parts of the TSR2 are preserved, here at Gatwick Aviation Museum we have TWO Olympus 32001 engines for the TSR2. I spent a short while at RRE in the late sixties and was told by the development engineers that most of the avionics systems had only reached design stage, only about 20% had even reached pre-production before it was stopped.