Historic aircraft on the move as Boulton Paul exhibit leaves RAF Cosford
A group of aero enthusiasts have watched a collection of planes and aircraft parts they had spent 20 years lovingly building and restoring driven off into the distance.
Members of Wolverhampton's Boulton Paul Association were left devastated when the RAF Museum at Cosford said it could no longer accommodate the replica and original pieces. The news came a year after it had taken delivery of the exhibits and promised to show them off.
But the association has found museums across the country willing to put them on display and have donated the collection.
The first batch was moved from RAF Cosford to the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum in Flixton on a fleet of transporters yesterday. Association chairman Cyril Plimmer, secretary Terry Herrington, chief engineer Jack Holmes and colleagues Bob Buck, Tony Wakely and Mike Mannering helped load the lorries.
"Although it was sad to see the planes go, we are really pleased to know that they will go on display to the public and not be shut away in a hangar possibly never to see the light of day again," said Mr Herrington. "It was very important to us that they go on public display after all the time and trouble that had been spent working on them by our members.
"What makes it even better is that the hangar in which they will be exhibited was built by Boulton and Paul and so it would have been difficult to find a more appropriate final resting place for them."
Among the exhibits are a P6 bi-plane, the replica of a research aircraft built by Boulton and Paul in 1917, a Hawker Hunter nose and cockpit, a replica Overstrand nose along with the world's first totally enclosed aircraft gun turret that it housed. The load was completed by a nose and cockpit flight simulator from the Gnat lightweight fighter originally used by the Red Arrows aerobatic team.
The replica of a Defiant bomber-destroyer will go to the Kent Battle of Britain Museum at Hawkinge, at a date still to be fixed. That will just leave the Balliol training aircraft built by the group that has two interested parties vying to take it but a final choice has still to be made.
The Boulton Paul Heritage Museum was forced to disband when GE, the owner of the site of the original Boulton Paul Aircraft factory in Wobaston Road, Pendeford, decided to prepare the site for sale in 2012.
