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By: - 28th September 2017 at 21:48 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Interesting, thanks for the thread and photos.
By: - 28th September 2017 at 22:58 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
cracking place, spent half a day with the kids there, thoroughly and utterly enthralled. Doesn't often happen. Going back in a few weeks and think i'll go again
By: - 29th September 2017 at 09:09 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Thanks for that, Meddle. I'll be there in a couple of weeks so will allow more time than I'd planned, as Snapper suggests.
By: - 29th September 2017 at 23:27 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Interesting photos Meddle. Particularly the two Hastings cockpits.
I visited the museum back in 2008, and they weren't there then. Where did they come from, on the island. Don't recall any mention of them in any books.
Any info appreciated.
Great Museum.
By: - 29th September 2017 at 23:38 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
The two cockpit sections were found in a disused scrapyard. They were part of a larger cache of parts - some of which were donated to a Halifax project in Canada. Here is a link to a thread from some time ago which tells the story:
https://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?110462-Handley-Page-Airframe-Parts-From-Malta-To-Canada-(Update)
Tim
By: - 30th September 2017 at 07:11 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Fantastic! Thx for sharing the pix. Some gems worthy of work there
By: - 30th September 2017 at 13:11 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
There is a lot of material there. The small footprint of the museum is misleading, and I would give yourself a good morning or so to get around the whole thing.
This is the Gladiator project:
Apparently there was some Stuka material mixed in with the Gladiator parts here.
This tidy example of a Link Trainer was also a nice surprise:
As was this Meteor canopy hiding in among other parts outside:
The key is to look up, look down, look under and look behind things! For example I was impressed with how a Meteor (possibly a T7?) had been taken apart and effectively hidden in the same hangar as a Huey and partial DC3 section. I had overlooked these parts until the man on the front desk pointed them out. You can just see the engines, sitting vertically in this shot:
Whereas the cockpit was here:
On our last day on Malta we were treated to a couple of passes from the museum's Tiger Moth, which operates from a section of restored runway at the racecourse adjacent to the museum. During our stay on Malta we saw several military movements, including traffic for a small airshow they were holding over the weekend of the 23rd and 24th. I spotted a couple of Hercs, a couple of A400Ms as well as the Swiss Pilatus display team and the 'Turkish Stars' display team, who thundered up the Gozo/Comino channel with smoke on, in groups of twos and threes. Civil movements in and out of Luqa are easily spotted from all over the island as well. I also saw several Antonov 12s rumbling out of Luqa, which I don't generally get to see in Edinburgh.
By: - 30th September 2017 at 14:26 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Meddle, the canopy looks to me like a Canadian Fairey Swordfish one. Not Gladiator.
Dave
By: - 30th September 2017 at 20:01 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
The canopy is from a Canadian Fairey Swordfish II and not a Gladiator. The museum has HS491 as a restoration project. Some images including one showing this canopy alongside the fuselage of the Swordfish can be seen here:
http://www.airport-data.com/aircraft/photo/001049032.html
Tim
By: - 30th September 2017 at 20:13 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Malta had such a great varied aviation history, and quite a few airfields for such small island. I was always sad to hear that some years back the Lockheed Constellation bar which was situation on the island not far from the airport got burnt down. Wonder if any substantial pieces remain of this aircraft?
By: - 30th September 2017 at 20:20 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I photographed that Super Connie shortly after it closed as a venue - I was told that at one time it had been a wedding parlour! The final entry in the following history answered your question about its remains:
http://www.conniesurvivors.com/5T-TAF.htm
Tim
By: - 30th September 2017 at 20:45 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Oddly enough there was a Connie at Faro, as converted to a restaurant, when my inlaws traveled there in the '80s. I understand it has long since been chopped up as well.
By: - 30th September 2017 at 21:20 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
The Super Connie that was a restaurant at Faro in Portugal was carefully dismantled quite a while after it closed as a restaurant. It lay in that dismantled state for some time and was to have been relocated but that all fell through and as you say it was destroyed in the end.
By: - 30th September 2017 at 21:27 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Re post #8: I didn't know Gladiators were powered by Wright R-2600's!
Seriously though; a friend of mine was travelling around the island around 30 years ago and found a pair of crated R-2600's behind an old farmhouse at the side of the lane way up in the sticks. I wonder if the engine in the pic is one of those?
The Meteor F.8, WK914 is, in fact, WF714, ex-Manston, Duxford, Hooton Park, Millom, Hooton Park (again) then shipped to Malta.
Anon.
By: - 30th September 2017 at 21:36 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Is the Gladiator parts one dredged up from the sea. Does the museum now have the complete one that was displayed in Valletta castle.
By: - 30th September 2017 at 22:32 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
The Gladiator 'Faith' is still in Valletta, in the war museum in Fort St. Elmo. I find lots of references online to many people wanting it moved to the air museum, but nothing has happened. It is displayed, minus the wings.
By: - 1st October 2017 at 09:16 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I understand that they also have a Martinet cockpit. Has anyone seen that recently?
By: - 1st October 2017 at 14:20 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I thought that their Martinet components were limited to a set of cockpit glazing and windscreen:
See:
https://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?122066-Miles-Martinet-Master-Rudder-Pedals
By: - 1st October 2017 at 15:01 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Unless it has recently been cleared and built on, there could be a cache of aircraft bits at Hal Far WW2 airfield. I was, for a time, many years ago stationed at both St. Andrew's and St. Patrick's barracks near St. George's Bay. There was a number of airframes either on or adjacent to Hal Far.
By: - 1st October 2017 at 16:11 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
In the early 1970's Kevin Patience, stationed in Malta with the RAF, sent me these two images of a pair of wings he had spotted at the Targa Gap Civil Defence Yard in 1968.
Eureka. I finally tracked them down to a quayside storage facility in 1985.
Eventually and delicately an equitable trade was negotiated. :)
Mark
Posts: 1,613
By: Meddle - 28th September 2017 at 21:31
I tend to Google somewhere before I visit. This is especially true if I'm a tourist somewhere! As such I tend to try and find out where the aviation museum is in a given place, and what they have in their collection. Presumably I'm not alone here. While I had a good basic knowledge of the Malta Aviation Museum thanks to Google, I was still surprised by a few things I discovered there. One or two of these might already be common knowledge, but still might be of interest to somebody out there:
A couple of Hastings cockpits, retrieved from a scrap yard. These are WJ325 and WJ328, apparently. The cockpit on the left once had WJ324 written on it, as per a Flickr stream from 2015 I found earlier on today, though I didn't see this writing when I visited and some still consider it to be WJ325, confusingly. The WJ325/324 cockpit was in better condition internally:
Whereas the second appeared a little rougher, though neither is especially good:
Around the back of another section of the museum I found what is, apparently, the remains of a Mosquito cockpit:
The Mosquito cockpit was a surprise. I've read about the Mosquito center section that was in a scrapyard on the island, but it appears that the scrapyards containing aviation material were cleared at some point fairly recently so there isn't the hidden gems that once could be found here.
I took many more photographs than this, but none are especially good and I'm not sure they show anything that hasn't been covered elsewhere. I tried to capture any piles of material I found around the museum in case something interesting, rare or unusual was mixed in. If you have a hunch there is something in the museum then give me a shout and I can see if I have a corresponding snap.
In general the Malta Aviation Museum is a really enjoyable place to visit and I can highly recommend it. I'm sure many of you will have already been. Malta in general is a more laid back place than Britain (occasionally maddeningly so), but the positive side to this is that you can get right up to the museum exhibits and look at them at close quarters. For example Meteor WK914 is currently being stripped down, and it was fascinating to see the layers of finish, right down to what looked like yellow Halfords filler primer in some spots.
There is a lot of material within the museum, and there is fairly minimal interpretation at times. I had to keep going back to the man on the front desk and ask him what I was looking at. For example there was apparently JU 87 material mixed in with what I thought was the remains of a Gloster Gladiator.