I was there on the Thursday before the Classic Fighters 2009 airshow when the Stuka was being painted into Italian Air Force colours. Even when it had no paint it looked pretty realistic.

In the hangar

Being painted

I have travelled around the world on two occasions and visited Hendon. Nothing will stop most of you UK-dwellers doing the same to come to NZ and look at these aircraft restored to flight and being shown off at an airshow -they have three or four shows a year now, and the TVAL hangar is open every weekend to visit too.

I’d rather see almost any old aircraft restored and flying with a top notch collection that cares for it and keeps it flying, than stuck in a dark mausoleum.

The TVAL collection has enlightened so many thousands of people from across New Zealand and the world about WWI era aviation and air war, myself included. Those aeroplanes and that era was something I never previously appreciated properly while simply looking at old dead planes in museums. Seeing them live, hearing them, smelling them, watching them dogfight and formate, etc, while their stories are told colourfully by the commentary is a thrill of a lifetime, and brings all the stories into a much better perspective than anything sitting lifeless in a museum.

The canopy is all but shut in all the images. The assumption seems to have been made that the cockpit shot was taken by somebody sitting in the pilot’s seat. I doubt that canopy would slide open after all that time and sand. The glazing behind the canopy is clearly broken in the side hatch shot so surely the photographer could have reached in there and popped a shot, as many of us have done. The lens must be fairly wide to have got the full width of the panel, and some, again suggesting the camera was well back in the cockpit.

Mark

That is what I was trying to suggest in Post #179.

I have done the same thing myself with a P-40 and and a Spitfire fuselage at ground level, taken photos of the interior by putting my hand in with the camera. Simple. I have done it too with an Oxford.

Finally all that money on the Mars Rover has finally paid off, just how did it get up there?

We had a Lotto ad a few years back with the same theme of a veteran spending his winnings to return to his WWII Italian battlefield, but with a nice twist at the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOKNQNsj6Xk

I have seen many of the collection’s fantastic aeroplanes at the two-yearly Classic Fighters airsgow at Omaka. It is by far my favourite airshow anywhere. The old WWI machines never really interested me much at all till I first went to Omaka and had a sort of revelation, they are really so much better in person than I ever expected, and seeing the spectacles like seven Fokker Dr1’s or three SE5a’s and the gorgeous Pfalz D and Albatross, etc, really brings that era to life. They really are magic. I’m ever so grateful to Sir peter and his team for enlightening not just me but several generations of New Zealanders and visitors to what these planes were all about.