Sadly, I only caught a few minutes at the start, but did see a very creditable shot of the aircraft’s passenger cabin being prepared at Manchester. Absolute spit of an old Airspeed publicity shot I have – but startlingly in colour.

Shame that a aircraft type so well-liked by crews and passengers ended with such a poor safety record.

The German’s didn’t have any airbourne strategic offensive capability. Safe from attack, allied factories could just keep turning out machines.

If, however, the Germans had pushed relatively simple weapons like the photocell-triggered oblique mortar into widespread service prior to D-Day then they may well have made daylight strategic bombing unsustainable. Since this sort of system ‘merely’ requires a head-on attack rather below the victim’s altitude, it might well have been effective with poorly trained fighter crews.

Its hard to imagine a senario (from the safety of sixty years hindsight) in which the Nazi’s could have won after the attack on the USSR. If nothing else, the Nazi state would probably have collapsed economically.

I think that the Allies would have won anyway through sheer weight of productivity (in the West) and force of numbers (the East). But if the V1s and Me262s had been in widespread use to disrupt the build-up to D-Day, history might have been different.

iirc, the peak month for WWII aircraft production in German controlled territories was November 1944 (Green’s “Warplanes of the Third Reich”). If true, pretty amazing considering the degree of disruption to that bombing did to infrastructure.

Ignoring opinions of the Nazi’s grasp of strategy etc, I guess the Luftwaffe was defeated by attrition and the allies’ strategic campaign against fuel production and distribution.

Amazing though they were, the failure to bring technological jumps like the Me262 into substancial service was not the issue.

She looked fine when she flew over North Oxon about an hour ago.

Spitfire (? only caught a glimpse) flying in very loose formation sounds odd to me. Not a Merlin, perhaps?

For God’s sake, shut up – this has become totally boring.

Understated

There’s a difference between specialist and raw materials. I spent many years selling (commercial) aluminium alloys. It’s a long time ago now but I’m fairly confident all our aircraft alloy mills had ceased production by the early 80’s.

Thankfully not. There is Pechiney Aviatube in Lilyhall, Cumbria producing volume aircraft extrusion (variously known as HDA, AHDE etc in the past and currently owned by Alcan). There is also BA Tubes in Redditch owned by Luxfer, Magnesium Elektron in Manchester, Alcoa’s plate mill at Kitts Green, several sheet mills and I don’t know what in forging and forging alloys, not to mention a whole range of specialists down stream such as Superform in Worcester and the various stockholders. The UK aviation business is big business – we just don’t make much in the way of whole planes 🙁

Its worth mentioning that much of the practical work for 8000 series lithium-aluminium alloys was undertaken at Alcan’s then R&D facility in South Bucks into the late 80’s.

Then again, lots of aircraft are made with composites these days and the UK is no slouch in that field.