The Little World

As soon as I saw the photographs of the Avia S-199 in Czechoslovakia and then later in Israel I knew someone was fooling with me. The propellor gave it away. It was a cartoon propellor from a Daffy Duck movie. I mean, who would put as big a prop on a plane like that…?

Well if you were trying to get the power out of an old bomber engine in a fighter plane chassis, you might be tempted. Heaven knows what the torque twist would have been like when that started to turn fast…and what the forces on the spindly little undercart of the Me 109 would do. The American forces used big Hamilton Standards on their high-powered fighters and they had heavier planes with wider track landing gear. I wonder how many Avia S-199’s ending up upside down?

Well, here it is in front of the oil tanks at Ess Bend Aviation – ready for the museum. The canopy will be fine in Alberta but if they sell it off to Israel someone is going to have to coat the perspex with UV-reducing film or it will bake itself opaque in a summer. That’s already happened to several aircraft out there in the desert. Not that they’ll be flying them again any time soon, but if you are going to pay all that money to refurbish something you want it to last a while.

Aviation museums have a problem – they either have to build a large enough structure to protect the valuable pieces – and that means a lot of surface area – or they have to accept that aircraft weather and degrade out in the sun and rain. It’s fine if the institution has service money from the government to spare but if they are private it’s a real problem. Art museums and institutions dedicated to smaller items have it a lot easier in housing them…though the armour museums must have to pay a bit for the re-enforced concrete of the floors. At least very few armour museums blow away in high winds.