Supermarine Spitfire

Heard the chief archeoligist of the project on the radio yesterday talking about this, he said they dont even know if the aircraft are there, so it seems talk of mint spitfires in crates coming out the ground is a jumping the gun a bit.

outkast;118256 wrote:

Heard the chief archeoligist of the project on the radio yesterday talking about this, he said they dont even know if the aircraft are there, so it seems talk of mint spitfires in crates coming out the ground is a jumping the gun a bit.

Yes, that's why most of us are highly dubious about the whole thing until such time as some actual evidence emerges...

TV go completely over the top: 'This is a greater treasure than King Tutankhamun's tomb! There are at least three other caches of buried Spits nearby...' If in doubt make it up.

I wish them luck and hope the Burmese don't get all humpy and slap a court order on anything recovered. Some of the aviation recovery 'experts' have pretty cavalier techniques. I'm thinking of 'Swamp Ghost', the B17 in the Indonesian swamp that was fine for 50 years where it was and ended up sliced up with chainsaws to make it easier to move....

I'd love to see somebody re-building/flying a 'Wimpey'. The Wellington is my favourite of all of them. There is only one complete one left out of how many built?

The Leeds University team of geophysicists are carrying out further surveys using various techniques at Mingaladon Airport, Yangon (Rangoon) starting today 8th January, with the dig expected to begin on the 15th January.
The investigation is being financed by Wargaming.net who have set up a blog about the project which is worth a read . They have also been making a film since last summer. There is quite a lot of information on the internet now, just search using "burma spitfires".
Personally I think that in such a monsoon area any buried crates, even if they were coated with tar, before internment, will be waterlogged, sadly.

Not looking good so far !
An excavation team searching for a stash of legendary World War II-era British fighter aircraft in northern Myanmar said Wednesday it had found a wooden crate believed to contain one of the planes, but it was full of muddy water.

It was not immediately clear how much damage the water may have caused, and searchers could not definitively say what was inside the crate.

But British aviation enthusiast David J. Cundall, who is driving the hunt for the rare Spitfire planes, called the results "very encouraging."

"It will take some time to pump the water out ... but I do expect all aircraft to be in very good condition," Cundall told reporters in Myanmar's main city, Yangon.

The single-seater Spitfire, which helped Britain beat back waves of German bombers during the war more than six decades ago, remains the most famous British combat aircraft.

Britain built a total of about 20,000 Spitfires, although the dawn of the jet age meant the propeller-driven planes quickly became obsolete.

As many as 140 Spitfires — three to four times the number of airworthy models known to exist — are believed to have been buried in near-pristine condition in Myanmar by American engineers as the war drew to a close.

The wooden crate located in northern Myanmar was found in Myitkyina in Kachin state during a dig that began last month. It is one of several digs planned nationwide, including another near the airport in Yangon.

Cundall said the search team in Kachin state inserted a camera into the crate and found it was full of water. It was unclear what was inside the crate, he said, but the water will be pumped out during an operation that could take weeks, he said.

The go-ahead for excavation came in October when Myanmar's government signed an agreement with Cundall and his local partner.

Under the deal, Myanmar's government will get one plane for display at a museum, as well as half of the remaining total. DJC, a private company headed by Cundall, will get 30 percent of the total and the Myanmar partner company Shwe Taung Paw, headed by Htoo Htoo Zaw, will get 20 percent.

During the project's first phase, searchers hope to recover 60 planes: 36 planes in Mingaladon, near Yangon's international airport; six in Meikthila in central Myanmar; and 18 in Myitkyina. Others are to be recovered in a second phase.

Searchers hope the aircraft are in pristine condition, but others have said it's possible all they might find is a mass of corroded metal and rusty aircraft parts.

Cundall said the practice of burying aircraft, tanks and jeeps was common after the war.

"Basically nobody had got any orders to take these airplanes back to (the) UK. They were just surplus ... (and) one way of disposing them was to bury them," Cundall said. "The war was over, everybody wanted to go home, nobody wanted anything, so you just buried it and went home. That was it."
Stanley Coombe, a 91-year-old war veteran from Britain who says he witnessed the aircraft's burial, traveled to Myanmar to observe the search.

It is "very exciting for me because I never thought I would be allowed to come back and see where Spitfires have been buried," Coombe said. "It's been a long time since anybody believed what I said until David Cundall came along."

Wish them lots of luck. I reckon they'll need it. If these supposed spitting crates had been buried in a nice dry desert then we might have King Tut's tomb but as 'Sparkgap' wrote in the previous post..rainy Burma must be about the worst place to bury something and haul it out 70 years later intact.

I'd also worry that the disposal of surplus military equipment normally involved 'putting it beyond use' in modern terms. In the old days:
'Oi Fred! Bring that Sherman over here and flattern these boxes for me...'

Luck with it.

OldTG12;118467 wrote:

Wish them lots of luck. I reckon they'll need it. If these supposed spitting crates had been buried in a nice dry desert then we might have King Tut's tomb but as 'Sparkgap' wrote in the previous post..rainy Burma must be about the worst place to bury something and haul it out 70 years later intact.

I'd also worry that the disposal of surplus military equipment normally involved 'putting it beyond use' in modern terms. In the old days:
'Oi Fred! Bring that Sherman over here and flattern these boxes for me...'

Luck with it.

Reminds me of my old metalwork teacher. He used to tell his war stories, he was in the army before joining the RAF and becoming a bomb aimer on Wellingtons. One story he told us was used to illustrate the brittleness of cast iron. On the retreat to Dunkirk, he watched a soldier go along a line of brand new BSA army motorbikes with a hammer, cracking each crankcase in turn, so they couldn't be used by the Germans. (Goodness knows why, what would you prefer? A BMW or a leaking old hunk of Birmingham's finest?). What would have happened if, once the British had departed, the locals had dug up the planes and started using them aggressively against neigbouring countries? It could be entirely feasible that each example was damaged in the same way, so you copuldn't even cobble them together out of bits

I'd have thought if you were leaving a country with no orders what to do with the planes, you'd have just burnt them to the ground (ain't no-one going to be using them then) instead of putting them all in a big hole in the ground, which someone had to dig and fill in.

I remain hopeful, but highly dubious, if that's possible.

Steve