And 23 thousand bucks doesn't sound expensive

It's a long time since I was working on the that sort of stuff so you
could well be right. I'd be very surprised if the RAF ever resorted to
it though.

I think it might even need to be a worse situation than that.

 

Because of course we'd know you're wrong. ;-)

 

I did.

 

Heh heh. No, no. I don't think I could go through all of that again.

 

I was over at Oracle SJ wen Larry E. bouight the 2 Migs (1 for spares).
IIRC the FAA never allowed him to use them there.

 

Hog wrote:

1. CAA != FAA
2. US != UK (well at the moment, at least)

 

Oh look I'm cold, you know what I meant!

 

That'd be the Colville Road works (known locally as "The Pit")
then I guess? Don't know what the company was called but
I know they used to make Spitfire replicas down there.

So you were probably visiting MotorMec ?

 

antonye says...

I honestly can't remember who I was there to see, it was when I was
managing a car accessories and sunroof firm based in Norwich, so that
would make it about 1991 ish.

 

Mauro Floriani ?

 

About 55 airworthy Spits at the last count, about 200-250 existing.
More Hurricanes flying each year, though still only a handful as
they're hard to rebuild

More German stuff than you might imagine especially since the end of
the cold war, but little of it airworthy. Most the Ju52s aren't JU
built but Spanish or French.... Jap stuff is very rare and only a very
few flyers.

Surprisingly many. 1 flyer and the one at Duxford flew in c.1980.
Enola Gay and the other atom bomber both still exist and there's 10-20
others.

 

The authorities don't like military jets flying in civil hands dur to
the complexity and potential for disaster if it all goes tits up. In
mil service they tended to need an enormous amount of maintenance to
flying time - something like a Lightning the ratio is something of the
order of 40:1. The only Lightnings flying are in S Africa as the UK
CAA won't authorise them. There's been less worry in the US, but a
couple of high profile crashes recently has begun to change things.

 

Maybe. The Czech airforce put a whole bunch of Mig21 up for auction
end last year. Looks like these are some of them.

 

Correct, but a couple of possibilities for the mid term future...

 

Mostly Spanish built versions of German types

 

And not even a 'heh'. Bastard.

 

Dan L wrote:
..

Indeed, then taken indoors, sold off to private restorers and replaced
with plakky reps.

Which one? They had two over the years...

Most recently there was a Mk XVI on the gate, from 1970 until 1989,
which is now in Florida and airworthy, before that they had a 22 which
is now at Duxford in bits.

 

Ain't no Tornados flying in private hands, not nowhere. There's a
couple of stripped out ones that have been sold off but no flyers.

 

I was hiding the hangar, flicking V's at you all. Or maybe it was
after I'd left.

 

No Hawks, but quite a few JPs, Gnats, Hunters, Canberras. You can fly
the Hunter on a normal PPL, which is one of the reasons for the doubts
about it all. Effectively you could jump out of a Cessna 152 with 40
hours behind you, and if you had the cash, jump straight into a Hunter
and bore holes in the sky. A few pilots have done something similar,
with a bit more experience and there's been a number of deaths.

The CAA in the UK allows "simple" jets to fly on the provate register,
the most complex so far is the Sea Vixen. The LIghtnings never got
near and there was an attempt to get an ex RAF Phantom flying but the
cost and complexity of the attempt foiled it. There is a Buccaneer
that should be flying in the UK soon, but it's being operated by a
civilian owned firm that works for the military. Then there's that
Vulcan...