WIX Archives

Re: And how about..............EN199

Posted by PeterA on Tue May 13, 2003 02:07:18 PM

In reply top And how about.............. posted by Cees Broere on Tue May 13, 2003 10:45:42 AM

Cees
Against all the odds this project made it despite being discarded to the scap heap on two occasions.
After initially being donated to the local Boy Scouts in May 1947, it degraded in their care to the point where it became used as a Civil Defence training aid and finally bruised and dismembered ended up at Targa gap. In the early 1970's I made an approach to the then Prime Minister seeking the possibility of acquiring the wings for a joint Seafire project I was engaged on with with Neville Franklin. The request was politeley acknowledged with the response that the parts had now been collected for a proposed War Museum. Visiting Malta for the first time in 1985 I enquired of EN199 to be told that the 'x' number of pieces the fuselage was in had been consigned to a scrap yard after repeated complaints that cars were scraping it in the tight museum car park..... and the wings. The wings it transpired were thought to be in a storage facility that literally had not had the doors open for some years. After some long and protracted negotiation these were eventually traded to me and were the key to my proposed Mk XII project, EN224. To a subsequent group of new and enthused museum supporters, who re-located and recoverd the fuselage pieces, the loss of 'their' wings was taken in good spirit. They set too and rebuilt/reconstructed two wings using the leading edges of BR108 and Rib 1's supplied from the UK. Although I am sure the Maltese would be the first to agree that their first venture into aircraft sheet metal on the fuselage using principally pop rivets and commercial grade aluminium and a very limited budget could perhaps be described as 'adequate'. The overall restoration however, from the display point of view, is first class.
My understanding is that lessons learned on the Spitfire and later restorations are turning the recoverd Hurricane into something quite special and I look forward to seeing it on my next visit.

: the maltese Spitfire EN199.
:
: How about that restoration considering the standard of rec
: onstruction?
:
: Not that I am dismissing this airframe, but I am just curi
: ous how one can ressurect a seaminly dead aircraft into a
: beautiful museum piece
:
: Cees
:

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