Hi Mark
I certainly don’t think it need be the case that anything needs to be “scrapped off”.
This is all based on a financial imperitave – the comercial value of a finished article – in a hundred years when all this stuff is in a museum the replicas will not be thought as highly of in financial or historic terms but the authentic remaining parts are another matter.
Just because someone wants a flying Spit/P40 etc doesn’t justify the destruction of an original airframe / wreck and that is the position black and white – easy.
I understand all the provinance BS and all the reasons why the case has been made for scrapping the discarded stuff . I understand I am not going to convince anyone here who has a fixed position. At the end of the day though when I see a perfectly usable and historic load of components go to a smelter I am still going to be upset about it and create a fuss because it is historic vandalism and it needs to stop. We don’t let people go and tear down Stonehenge because it can be crushed and made into road base.
We can have the best of both worlds here if sanity starts to take over. I am a big fan of the replica Warbirds – they are safer – cheaper and a very cost effective way for people to enjoy their favourite historic aircraft. But why should we destroy historic airframes to facilitate it when it isn’t necessary.
Governance arrangements are the key here – Lets just move on to an idea that could help – just suspend all current concepts and work with me a little here.
Ok someone recovers a P40 and wants to create a flying restoration and sends it to a shop to get it done . The restoration facility is geared to rebuild P40s and quite correctly has the capacity to create a scratch build replica – they don’t really need the reference airframe except for Identity because they build these things in a series like a production line and all the parts are built in batches so nothing much goes into the airframe. Next because they are more concerned about identity and because they don’t make money out of static restorations they set aside the original airframe. One of two things then happens sell/ pass on the original material or Scrap it because of provinance issues.
I would hypothecize that a new approach be devised whereby each recovered airframes identity be established and registered. The registration authority would be global in much the same way as a domain registration applies and only one airframe could purport to be that machine be it static or airworthy – if the identity was moved on to another rebuild then the source material could not also be registered as the same aircraft – no registration no provinance – easy. I would also support the idea of allowing aircraft to take on the identity of aircraft known to be totally destroyed and a register of available identities eastblished from which restorers could select appropriate identities – but only once. This already has happened where no identity ever existed on a restoration and an Identity was just invented and the data plate concocted – No issue with that
Anyway some ideas for further discussion
Regards
John P
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