Warbird Information Exchange

This spar came from one of the former Royal Navy corsairs recovered off the coast of Australia about ten years ago. He has the remains of at least two of those aircraft recovered... terrible shape, but useful parts were found to replicate, and in some cases, re-use.

Cheers,
Richard

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Richard Mallory Allnutt - Photography - http://www.rmallnutt.com

Do you have any pictures of those remains? It seems pictures, for some reason, are very hard to come by of the Australia recoveries.

I believe Peter A has posted the only pics I've seen. A corroded centre lump as far as I recall.

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James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

Here's an old link showing the stuff that was pulled up by Warbird Salvage Pty. Ltd. To the best of my knowledge, this is the same batch of material that McBurney ended up with.

http://home.st.net.au/~dunn/ozatwar/dumped@sea.htm

Another rough but more complete center section was dragged to shore by a prawn trawler in 1998. It was a bit more intact with the main landing gear still extending from the wheel wells. I'm not sure how it fared since it was not the subject of recovery by would-be preservationists.

There are reportedly "hundreds" of Corsairs and other RNFAA aircraft sitting on the ocean bottom off the Queensland Coast. The RNFAA elected to push the majority of their aircraft overboard there after WWII rather than ship the stuff back home. Salt water immersion means any recovery efforts are completely unfeasible now, financially anyway. Everything down there is good for nothing but patterns, even though much of it probably appears completely intact.

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Rob Mears
'Surviving Corsairs' Historian
robcmears@yahoo.com
http://www.robmears.com

Thanks JDK and Rob. I would still like to see the pictures from RMAllnut, if he is at liberty to post them. On that link that Rob provided, it says that 3 Corsairs were recovered in 1990. McBurney ended up with one. Where did the other two go, or were they scrapped?

Sorry to say that I don't have any photographs of the center sections recovered (there are some pix in a Warbirds Worldwide issue). They were a lot more substantial than the one shown for auction in the links above. I believe that Craig got two of the aircraft recovered, and the third was parted out. I had a fair degree of conversation with the recoverer's and acquired some of the parts myself. It was surprising how well some pieces were preserved, and how others right next to them were completely fizzled. There was a great shot of a main spar they tried to sell (positioned by a topless girl holding a glass of champagne). It was straight, but completely riddled with corrosion. The $50k asking price seemed a little steep for what could only be a static, restoration.

Cheers,
Richard

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Richard Mallory Allnutt - Photography - http://www.rmallnutt.com