--- In Whitley_project@..., "jimmy2steam"
<jimmy2steam@y...> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I can offer a fragment of information from an unreliable source.
> Back in the 1980s my Dad (ex Whitley crew) was talking to an RAF
> ground crew bod who served at Shawbury in the 1950s when the RAF
> still used Merlin Engined Mosquitoes. He said that they had worked
> on Merlin engines as part of their training and that the aircraft
> they were using was a derelict Whitley in one of the hangars at
> Shawbury. Maybe there was a Whitley there or maybe he remembered
> wrong. Who knows! 
>
> Jim
>


Hello Jim,

Thanks for that interesting snippet of information!
I know from my own experience that peoples memories can be very
unreliable. In aircraft stories every fighter seems to change into a
Spitfire and every bomber into a Lancaster as yarns are retold!

In this case, though, the story sounds very plausable. Ex-raf ground
crew can usually tell one aircraft from another and people don't
invent Whitleys too often....

The last Whitley flight was LA951 in 1949. According to Oliver
Tapper's book it was 'Withdrawn from service and dismantled'. He
doesn't say where. Aircraft withdrawn from flying often became
instructional airframes before finding their way to the scrapyard so
if Whitleys were still flying up to the end of the 1940's (well, a
few, anyway) then the idea of one being retained as an instructional
airframe at an MU like Shawbury in the 1950's is totally plausable.

The hope, then, is that they dragged it off to the mythical 'dump'
and buried it on the airfield, rather than dispatching it to the
local scrap man to melt down for metal. The cost of scrap duralamin
being what it was in those days, I suspect there may not be much
hope, but who knows?

Steve