Rotorboater wrote:My father remembers seeing huge piles of aircraft, spits & lancs, in huge piles at Trafford park waiting to be melted back into frying pans, it seems a waste now but at the time it was just ex military junk. I suppose a spitfire was not much use in peace time. I remember a friend buying 12 lightnings complete with engines and because they would have had to have a special escort to move them by road so he still sawed the wings off - sacrilege but he then ripped them apart for scrap later - such a waste but he couldn't exactly fly them could he!
I remember a similar story recounted by an old boy in the Bird in Hand pub Daveyhulme. Told of Spitfires, Motorcycles and Jeeps buried around Trafford Park. I'm sure the Gippo,s would have found them had they existed.
Zulus.............................Thousands of em!!!!!!!!!!!
EAA wrote:...The excavation project is expected to take four to six weeks. The aircraft are believed to be in excellent shape even 68 years after British troops buried them to prevent other forces from using the airplanes, which they did not want to ship back home. The troops buried the Spitfires in tarred wooden boxes, on top of large teak timbers to assist drainage and under a wooden roof before covering the burial site.
According to Cundall, half of all aircraft exhumed will go to the Burmese government, while Cundall will receive 30 percent of the recovered aircraft and his Burmese agent 20 percent. Companies have already indicated interest in restoring the airplanes, which are estimated to be valued to as much as $2.4 million.
Cundall has also received permission to excavate Spitfires at two other sites in Burma. Those sites may contain the extremely rare Mark 8 Spitfires, of which only one airworthy example remains.
Copied from the last post on the World of Warplanes blog;
"The water table is only a few feet down at our proposed excavation site. Dig a hole more than a few feet and it will instantly fill with water. We need to dig a trench up to 40 feet deep, so we’ve given up hope of digging this summer."
I'm willing to wager quite a substantial round of drinks that this will turn out to be a huge shaggy-dog story, either because the aircraft were never there, or because they have long since returned to bauxite.
Interesting to note that in the EAA piece, there is talk of 50% to the Burmese government, 30% to Cundall and 20% to the Burmese agent. So that means that Cundall's backer is working for free?
I'd like nothing better than to be proved wrong on this, but...
The long-anticipated dig to unearth a cache of brand-new Spitfires that are believed to be buried in Burma is expected to start on Jan. 12, local press has reported.
According to The Irrawaddy (http://www.irrawaddy.org/archives/20929), archeologists first will spend about a week studying the site, then the digging can begin. Up to 36 pristine Spitfires, still in the packing crates they were delivered in near the end of World War II, are expected to be found. David Cundall, who located the burial site (http://tinyurl.com/cufeslb), said he has confirmed the airplanes are there by sending a camera through a borehole. "We went into a crate, you can see an object which resembles a Spitfire," he said.
The British troops buried the airplanes when they left Burma in 1945, Cundall said, because they didn't want to take them home, but also didn't want anyone else to use them. The crates were tarred and placed on massive teak timbers to assist drainage, and a wooden roof was placed over the crates to protect them, Cundall said. The crates are buried about 30 feet deep in an area close to a runway at Mingaladon Airport in Rangoon. Cundall also has permission to excavate two other sites in Burma. At one of those sites, Cundall said he expects to find up to six crated Mark 8 Spitfires, a rare variation with only one copy still flying.
Of course all the bollox about we sent a camera through the borehole has been denied / refuted / obscured elsewhere. As ever with this story there is much in the way of conjecture (pristine?) and much deliberate / incompetent misinformation.
Jan 13 will tell - shades of the Mayan calendar methinks.
Rob P
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"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." - George Orwell-
Changing the subject slightly, my Dad did his National Service in the RAF from 1947. He was in electronics/radar. He spent weeks neatly laying out brand new valves on taxiways so that bulldozers could be driven over them to destroy them. Luckily he "saved" quite a few for later use in guitar amplifiers.
wsmempson wrote:Copied from the last post on the World of Warplanes blog;
"The water table is only a few feet down at our proposed excavation site. Dig a hole more than a few feet and it will instantly fill with water. We need to dig a trench up to 40 feet deep, so we’ve given up hope of digging this summer."
I'm willing to wager quite a substantial round of drinks that this will turn out to be a huge shaggy-dog story, either because the aircraft were never there, or because they have long since returned to bauxite.
My experience of the ground in that part of the world mirrors your assessment.
Local scrap dealers would have dug these out over fifty years ago if they existed.
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