Postby nickhenderson » October 3rd, 2012, 1:26 am
This is great to see. New Zealand has quite a history with the Mossie and as ex RNZAF, i got a lot more involved than most. As a schoolkid i worked in a model shop and the owner had quite a few parts from a Mossie. One of my school teachers was ex RAF and "knew of a barn" where one was kept, which i passed onto my boss but never knew what happened .Same teacher, with a student into aircraft, told me how he had baled out (of something, schoolboys have not brilliant memories!!) over the channel and ended up standing on a sandbar in the middle of lots of water for quite a few hours before being picked up!!
Later on after joining the Air Force, i found out where they had buried all the old planes. It wasnt long before i went digging and found a throttle quadrant guide plate, complete with the soft wire "gates" still in place. This was duly sent back to my old boss. Once, whilst on leave, he had me lockwire quite a bit of one of his engines, the glycol tank had a patch on it, supposedly from a bullet!!
Out the back of the base, away in the hills was (and still is) an old guy who had one in his barn with the wings sawn off just outside the nacelle,s in order to fit it in the barn.
He was not a very sociable bloke but did like to run the engines up if you provided the fuel, not something Joe public could easily do!! With friends in MT (Motor Transport), ie tankers etc, getting a 44 gal drum of Avgas was not tooooo difficult Just take a little bit over a looong time!! Twice, some friends and i went out to "pay" for the privilege of sitting up front while he ran the old girl up.
After moving base to a new squadron, if you went up to the top of the hangar roof (not allowed!!) and looked down on the flightline, you could quite easily make out the old flightline markings where the Mossies used to be parked.
Memorable days.
