The Little World

So why does a Bristol Blenheim Mk I bomber – a quintessentially early war RAF light bomber – show up in the Bomber Command hall of Stein’s Air World? I mean apart from the fact that there was a kit on the shelf at Stanbridge’s Hobby Shop and I had money in my pocket…

If I had built it as per the kit with a gun pack as the Mk I heavy night fighter it could have been excused – 406 Squadron RCAF flew them out of Acklington. But this is a bomber with visible bombs – purely an RAF plane.

Well, it’s my Air World. And I want to show the RAF as well as the RCAF. There’ll be planes later that look just like they are flying for the RAF… as indeed they are…but with Canadian crews. I’ll also do that for planes with Australian and New Zealand crews. The min thing is to feature as many different types in their characteristic or restored form. I can cite a local example – our Bull Creek RAAF museum has a 1:1 scale Consolidated PBY painted in US Navy colours in the front gallery and no-one thinks it out-of-place. They flew out of Matilda bay at Crawley in WW2 in lots of different paint schemes.

And that’s a museum, folks. The big ones connected to big air forces might be playing with big government money. They can be fussy, and they can buy things that others cannot. The smaller ones take what they can get, and sometimes they can’t be fussy. Donated gear is sometimes donated, sometimes dumped. The reason it is there is often because it is not somewhere else – and in many case we should darned grateful that whatever is left is there at all.

Too many times old aircraft were seen as so much scrap littering the scene. Navies dumped them off of aircraft carriers into deep water and sailed away whistling. Civilian operators gutted them and chopped the frames up for scrap. Barn finds were left to rot in bad conditions. Service stations painted them garish colours and used them as advertising signs. I haven’t done that yet with mine, but one day there is going to be a failed kit of some sort that ends up selling hamburgers and gasoline…

Stein’s Air World will sponsor Air Days at Wet Dog Regional Airport so there’s a good reason for visiting aircraft and oddities hauled out of the galleries and halls. The brief they operate upon is broad enough to cover most categories of aircraft. I will be setting a cutoff date for the displays, but as this has advanced well past WW2 there will be plenty of scope for more modern planes.

Remember museum aircraft can be exact replicas of what they were in service – perfect in every way. They can also be wrecks with just a few parts hung upon a display frame. And they can be anything in between – it all depends on what has been located and how much time the museum workers can put into it. They often have access to the most accurate information on any subject and can make the paint look perfectly correct. But they are sometimes reduced to giving it a good guess or to restoring something with modern materials. The final arbiter for a lot of this stuff is public perception.

The other thing to remember is that aircraft in an air museum are the big stars but there are always a lot more exhibits in the halls to support them; ordnance, posters, engines, radios, dioramas, models, souvenir stands, cafés… This will be a challenge too.

Oh, please let’s have some nice weather so the workshop is comfortable to work in…