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Time Team B-17 dig

Posted by Cees Broere on Sun Mar 21, 2004 06:20:36 AM

Hi all,

Just woke up this morning and was lucky to see the episode ons Discovery Channel of Time Team where they recovered a B-17. I always thought that his eposode was banned from broadcasting because something didn't go right. This particular crash is a very well known site as I had read about it in the book by Ian MacLachlan (Final Flights) and in there was the whole story about the crash published. Now the idea of the recovery was to establish the exact cause of the collision. Ian MacLachlan was one of the advisers on the program and they kept digging but found nothing significant for two days until it was finally decided to deepen the four foot (?) pit to fifteen feet on the last day and voila, a lot more was found. The whole thing looked a bit amateurish to me. Especially when they started looking fot two propellers which they coulnd't find and it turned out that they had been recovered twenty years earliers (as mentioned in the book) and had been on display at a local museum since. Also some of the .50 ammo was exploded on site which looked a bit stupid to me as that way you only manage to spread the rounds over a large area creating more problems than solving it.

Recently there was a plea by one of the producers of the series for a suitable aircraft recovery site of which a similar program could be made, now you know why our organisation isn't interested.

Any other ideas on this program from our UK contingent?

Cheers

Cees

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