A picture to make you cry
 

Goodbye Nimrod...

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/40/nim1813109c.jpg

It took me a second to realize that this was a pic of a scrapped Nimrod and not an operational one.

It's always sad to see well known and much loved aircraft been cut up. I saw footage of the F-111's here in Australia been cut up and it gave me the same feeling.:cry:

when the US started getting rid of the surplus aircraft in the Air force after WWII, my ex girlfriends Uncle J.K. (J.K. Havener, if the name rings a bell) was sitting in a theater one afternoon after his tour, and they showed a Marauder getting blown up, of all the planes they had to blow up, it was his, they even zoomed in on the nose art.

He was dragged out of the theater screaming every profanity at the top of his lungs as loud as he could.

I look at pictures like these and I could only imagine his pain.

Was posted on a predomintally Brit forum two days ago and believe me the shock and awe/disdain was unprecidented.

Sorry to say they all eventually get put out to pasture and then dismantled. I see it as an end to an era.

I think of all the warbirds lost to scrapheaps of history, and it makes me sad.

So many aircraft that have served nobly, carried crews through weather thick and thin, survived damage in the air and on the ground, with so many stories to tell... to wind up drying out in the desert sun before being turned into exported scrap.

It's why I will always support the preservation of historic vessels and aircraft, and urge everyone to do the same. These artifacts are our collective stories, and will be all we have of them once those who crewed them are gone.

It's a national disgrace that my government has given up on long range MPA and ASW. There is no replacement on the horizon let alone the cash to pay for it.

But after 4 years of skimming knuckles, getting soaked in fuel, drenched in hyd oil (don't get me started on the crew "rest" system) whilst fixing the Mighty Hunter, I kinda feel it got what was coming.

Not to say that I didn't have a good time travelling the world fixing it.

At least the RAAF is preserving some of the F-111's here in Australia. The local RSL club got an ex-army Leopard 1 tank for its memorial.

It looks pretty good surrounded by an anchor, a 40mm Bofors gun and an Aircraft propellor. It sit right next to the garden which holds the ashes of former servicemen and their partners. (The ashes of the servicemen are put into a wall with a small plauqe attached, the partners have their ashes scatted over the rose gardens surrounding the walls)

I'm glad to see that the Australian defense forces are preserving items that many servicemen and women has served on in one form or another. Regardless if it is in a museum, a memorial or an artifical reef, it can still serve a use or a function long after it comes off the front line.

Good to know some F-111's are being preserved. It's one of my favourite planes :)

I remember when the USAF got rid of the F-4 because its airframe was over 30 years old. Hey, MY airframe was over 30 years old!!

But we can't save every single airframe as a memorial. I hope that we do save some to populate some museums though.

About a million years ago, I was at the Air and Space Museum. One of the Docents was giving a nice talk about one of the transport aircraft. I forget which one. It was one of the smaller not so famous ones. He made the comment about flying on one as a crew member in the Korea timeframe. One of the visitors asked him if he flew on this type of aircraft.

He responded that he flew on THIS aircraft. :o

I wished I could have corralled him and asked him a ton of questions. I think he would have known the answer.

Imagine being a Docent in a museum with your aircraft in it. :salute:

Here's one for you, Plat. I was speaking a few years ago with one of the guys in the Torsk Volunteer Association. (Those guys are all a trip - many are sub vets of both Pigboat and Nuc flavors, and are fonts of knowledge.)

Anyway, I was working that day - a Saturday - and speaking with one of the TVA guys who was, at the time, standing with me in the Maneuvering Room on Torsk. As it turned out, the guy I was speaking to worked in Maneuvering. On Torsk, in the mid 60's.

He related to me a story: After he came back and worked on the boat for awhile as a volunteer, the TVA's archivist took him into the boat's archives (where forward battery used to be) and handed him a rolled up tube of papers. They opened the tape on the papers and took a look. In it, they found the boat's Electrician's log from 1965(? I think) with that volunteer's signature on it, from his signing off the duty log that day.

That was a cool story to hear him tell - that here he was, 40-some-odd years after the fact, and here was this piece of paper he signed while on duty back in the day, that he hadn't seen in all those years.

£4.1 billion to build, £200 million to scrap.......a complete farce:nope:

That's the stuff that makes studying history great! :yeah:

You said it, brother. It's why I love being involved with these guys - vets of all different stripes in all the services, for many nations - to hear them tell their stories and for the odd coincidences that come with 'em. There are days I wish I were ten of me, just to be able to get ten stories at once.

It's gonna be up to us to pass these guys' stories down, so I wanna get 'em right.