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Nice lead Paul............
Posted by Tony on Sat Dec 29, 2001 02:14:28 PM
In reply top Pprune posted by Paul Stewart on Sat Dec 29, 2001 12:48:23 PM
I look forward to disrupt.....errrr contributing on the current military stuff, however this excerot from a thread was interesting..
....Well some of these stories are very true.....
About 10 years ago, I was told a story about aircraft, Fairey Barracudas, being 'buried' at a local airfield, so one day, with my best friend in tow, we headed to the airfield with a metal detector.
After about 5 minutes of searching, we literally fell over some rusty old 'farm equipment'. Being inquistive, on closer examination I found what looked to be a fuel filler cap. Then we found bits of metal with round holes in it, which turned out to be part of an aileron.
We took some photos and sent a letter to the MOD asking permission to remove parts etc. The MOD passed the letter onto the Fleet Air Arm Musuem, who were very interested in the find, and they sent up the curator, Graham Motram.
He took some photos and confirmed that we had found the centre sections, complete with wing folding mechanisim, of at least five Fairey Barracudas. We also found other parts around the site, which went on for 30 metres around the centre, such as bomb shackles, data plates, hydraulic/fuel pipes.
The museum were rightly excited about the find, as there were in the process of restoring a Barracuda, as there are no complete examples anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, due to the 'location' of the parts and lack of funds, they were unable to recover the visible parts, nor do an excavation of the site.
Anyway, when the curator was up, he was telling us about the museums hunt for Barracuda parts, and he said they used to literally chase any story about buried aircraft, as most times there was a small element of truth to them. In fact they had even sent a team upto this airfield many years previously, but they never found anything.
So you never know what you may find on some of these old airfields.......
I don't want to know where the airfield is, just this....Did the FAA museum finally extract the bits?
Tony :0)