Aahz wrote:
k5083 wrote:
When I visited the Beijing Air & Space Museum in 2014 there was a cutaway MiG-9 wing on display as well as MiG-9 86104.
Perhaps this wing is related to the aircraft in your photo.
Wouldn't surprise me. After thinking about it, the airplane is owned by an aeronautical university and/or a museum. This aircraft may have been a study piece, which might explain why the skin is off one side of the fuselage but not the other; off one side of the wing but not the other. Perhaps they have all the pieces, including the engine, sitting around somewhere. The fuselage was in the parking lot and the starboard wing is on display, but the port wing and engine may be collecting dust in storage, or may even be at a branch location or a different university entirely. But there is a chance that enough pieces remain to reassemble most of it and restore the rest.
Anyone have a contact at Beihang University?
I'm glad somebody is paying attention.Glad you picked it out as well.
You are correct that the collection is the property of Beihang University, a major and prestigious Chinese engineering school; sort of the Chinese M.I.T. The school actually designed one airplane, the twin engined light transport with the faded red trim parked between the MiG-19 and the Harrier in your hotel shot. The new museum facility is in a teaching building on the sprawling campus and yes, it is partly a lab full of instructional airframes. Go through the wrong door and you find yourself in a hallway full of classrooms. There were cutaway displays there of Chinese and foreign types including bits of an F-84 and purportedly part of a B-25 nacelle. Even on campus, however, the museum is not that well known; it took me a while to find someone who could point me to it. To find someone who could answer your questions I guess I would start by being in the museum and being fluent in Mandarin, which I'm not.
I'm surprised by the distressed condition of the planes in your 2011 shot considering that they were all spiffed up and on display by 2012 when the new museum opened a couple of blocks away. Even if the restorations are just cosmetic, some fast work was done there. Most of the Chinese types in the museum looked so good that I wouldn't have thought they ever deteriorated to the point shown in your photos. Have you tried to ID all the partial airplanes along the top of your photo? I don't recognize some of them, and I think Hang the Expense may be talking about the fuselage just to the right of the MiG-9 fuselage when he mentions the second P-47.
August
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