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Squadron of Lost WWII Spitfires To Be Exhumed In Burma
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt that sounds like a good Neal Stephenson plot point: "Like a treasure chest stuffed with priceless booty, as many as 20 World War II-era Spitfire planes are perfectly preserved, buried in crates beneath Burma — and after 67 years underground, they're set to be uncovered. The planes were shipped in standard fashion in 1945 from their manufacturer in England to the Far East country: waxed, wrapped in greased paper and tarred to protect against the elements. They were then buried in the crates they were shipped in, rather than let them fall into enemy hands, said David Cundall, an aviation enthusiast who has spent 15 years and about $200,000 in his efforts to reveal the lost planes."
With recent austerity measures, the UK are looking at bringing these fighters back into service.
Thanks David!
It is sad when submitters don't check for the best sources.
Fox news copied their story from The Syndey Morning Herald, who copied the story from The Telegraph (UK) (April 14). There is a follow up story on the Telegraph site too; the buried spitfire story was revealed by a war vet, and they found them and made bore holes and looked inside the crates.
but actually useless.
Why unearthing all those planes?
To show? We already have plenty of original spitfires all over the world and a few also still working.
To sell? How would buy one?
To learn new things? Don't think so.
Because we fucking CAN.
They were covered in tar and grease and crated.
The region they were found in has mostly dry soil.
while I doubt all of them will fly I wouldn't be surprised if they can't get 6-12 of the 70 they found flying.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If they prove to be well preserved, they'll probably be amongst the best (working?) examples in the world. None of them saw active service - they came straight out of the factory, and assuming they can be put together.. why not?
but actually useless.
Why unearthing all those planes?
To show? We already have plenty of original spitfires all over the world and a few also still working.
To sell? How would buy one?
To learn new things? Don't think so.
The same could be said about many things, including quite a few people.
They are important both because they are a piece of history, but also because the Spitfire is one of the two most gorgeous planes ever made.
If you're a redneck unable to see the point of art for art's sake, consider this: People will pay good money to see these planes. If any of them are trainers, even more to get a ride in one. And there are plenty of people who would mortgage their home in order to buy one, or even a share in one. Spitfires have value because people think they have value. What you personally think is irrelevant - this is like finding crates of gold.
He would tend to the view that, rather than it being a sexual experience, a Stuka attack was more of a shit-in-the-pants affair. Even a friend of his who was a Lancaster navigator never showed any inclination to go to air shows post war.
Yes, the past romanticises everything. The Spitfire was pretty, but the old engineers i worked with when I started would recollect its awful design flaws - like the fuel tank right in front of the pilot (the reason so many pilots were burned.) Like the battlecruisers at Jutland, the Spitfire was of the "the only way not to get killed is not to get hit" school of design. The British aircraft of WW2 that most of them regarded as the pinnacle of design was the first stealth bomber - the Mosquito. The ex-WC who tried to teach us metalwork said that he owed his survival to being picked to fly a Mosquito - your chance of surviving a mission was over 99% while in the metal bombers it was around 96%, bad odds in a long war. Unfortunately, as its radar near-invisibility was achieved by being made largely of plywood, there aren't many left.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
In about the middle of the 1990s at the rifle range where I was taught to shoot, we demolished our old storage shed to make room for a new clubhouse. The shed had always been the same to me; I'd played in it from the late '70s, and the old pre-WWII comms and target shooting gear fascinated me (and probably started my delight in history and retro gear).
There was a hell of a lot of stuff we found inside there that hadn't been touched in decades, including grease-packed radio equipment. It was packed and forgotten since the end of WWII, and was absolutely brand new. I expected the grease would have consumed plastic components by then (like it does now if you leave spare parts in the packing too long) but nothing from the time used those plastics. We sold almost all of it but kept a couple of (fully working) sets for display.
Underneath the shed were more parts in crates - I'd always thought the crates stored under there were just junk, because the outside wood was eaten away and the boxes themselves had sunk in a foot of relatively damp ground where a little water had run every wet season. They were never-opened storage crates though - half a dozen crates of willys vehicle parts. I witnessed the opening of a few of them and there was no noticeable decay. Everything looked like it'd been made yesterday, and this was gear from the 1930s. It wasn't just mostly in good condition mind, *everything* was like new. Water had obviously come in and left silt through the packaging, but the grease, wax and bitumen worked a treat to protect what mattered.
It wouldn't surprise me terribly if seventy out of seventy of those planes were able to fly with the use of very few modern spares.
While I'm always happy to see a bit of history recovered frankly the only way i would have "squeed' about it as you put it is if they would have been German or Japanese planes, why? because so many of their planes were completely wiped off the face of the earth. With a few exceptions nearly all of the Allied planes survive, with models in museums and even some of them still flying, but so many of the Axis planes are completely gone, not even a single example preserved. I mean sure we have a few Zeroes and BF109s but try to find a Do217 or a Kate and they are all gone.
So while I'm glad they have these to restore personally I wish we had at least one example of every major and minor plane from BOTH sides so that we could preserve that history of aviation.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Planes have been pulled from swamps, bottoms of lakes, and worse and been restored to flying condition.
Yes, but we don't have Yoda here, do we?
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
"In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set - then at least I'll own something that has always worked." (Hermann Goering, 1943)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No, we should leave them sealed. Every collector knows they're worth more in the original box. I mean, who wouldn't jump at an eBay listing like:
"Spitfire Vintage MINT NEW IN BOX - SUPER RARE!!! (Returns: Not Accepted)"
I think it a bit of pity that these are 1945 Spits, with Gryphon engines and the modified airframes.
If you care to see what these XIVs might look like, see this:
http://www.spitfireperformance.com/spit14v109.html
The XIV marque - like other Gryphon Spits - had an elongated cowl, which interrupted the series of broad, elliptical shapes that made up a Spitfire, and gave it an extraordinary, sculptural quality.
Additionally, there was an enormous , five-bladed airscrew, behind a pointier spinner. The tiny cross section where the fuselage tapers toward the tali was "beefed up" and a much broader and taller tail/rudder structure again, change the elegant line of the aircraft. I suppose, as late as these models are, that Burma mk XIV's also have... Horror! The cut-down and bubble-top, instead of the more familiar hood and sloping airframe, behind the pilot.
Even in Merlin-engined Spitfires, you begin to see the transformation hinted with the Mk VIIIs that served in Australia and Asia, with clipped wingtips and pointed tops on their rudders. But these were gentler adaptations, and lent an interesting variant on the form of the aircraft that wasn't displeasing.
Altogether, so seriously altered, the Spitfire may well have been able to maintain itself against the equally radical adaptations made in BF109s and FW190s. However in doing so, the Spit looked more derived from Hawker's Tempest fighters, albeit with a nip at the chin, and less like the supple, equine aircraft that Reg Mitchell derived from Thompson Trophy racing winners of the 1930s.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."