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Celebrating St Athan RAF base’s 75th anniversary

Both the BBC and Wales Online have reported how the St. Athan RAF base in Wales’ Vale of Glamorgan, which was thought to be obsolete within two years of opening, is celebrating its 75th birthday. The celebration took place yesterday with a parade and a flypast, but there is once again some uncertainty as to the base’s future.

The St. Athan RAF base was conceived in 1938 as a maintenance base with the site being chosen because it was thought that south Wales was beyond the range of Luftwaffe bombers. However and on June 20, 1940, a German attack on the base launched from captured French airfields quickly brought any notion of a safe haven to an end. Moreover, the RAF was loosing so many aircraft that repairing what survived in combat seemed like an impossible task. This forced the base to reinvent itself as a source of experts in the reclamation of badly-needed spares from irreparably damaged aircraft.

In the 1950s, the base was given the task of maintaining Vulcan Bombers carrying Britain’s nuclear warheads, but its future became doubtful after nuclear warheads shifted from bombers to submarines. St. Athan RAF base was ultimately saved by the receipt of a maintenance contract for the RAF’s fleet of VC10 air tankers and later on by the newly-launched Tornado fighter jets.

Later on, many buildings were demolished as part of a doomed £14 billion scheme to create a tri-service Defence Technical College. Nevertheless, the base’s tradition of repairing aircraft is alive and well because according to Wing Cmdr Paul Regan:

"The recruits who come to St Athan today arrive with 10 weeks basic training and leave eighteen months later with such a range of engineering skills that we often have a job to hold onto them within the forces. We may not do the glamorous work here, but our graduates are the young men and women with the ability to repair equipment under fire, or manufacture a bespoke part for an aircraft in the middle of Afghanistan when it could take weeks to fly one in from the UK."

However, the base ceased being called RAF St Athan in 2006, and it now seems likely that there will be no RAF presence at the base by 2016. With that said, there is growing number of commercial businesses attracted by the Welsh Government’s business park on part of the base as St Athan continues to reinvent itself to stay relevant.

The Maid of Harlech: A rare Lockheed P-38F Lightning awaits rescue from a Welsh beach

The Daily Post and the Daily Mail recently reported that the wreckage of a rare Lockheed P-38F Lightning which crashed during World War II and has been dubbed the “Maid of Harlech,” remains hidden under the sand of a Gwynedd beach near Harlech. The aircraft was found six years ago after being covered by sand for more than 65 years.

Pilot USAF Lt Robert Elliott was attempting to make an emergency landing at the RAF airfield at Llanbedr after his engines cut out on a training flight in September 1942. Fortunately, Lt Elliott was able to walk away from the beach unscathed; but a few weeks later, he was killed in North Africa.

A passer by rediscovered the downed aircraft in the spring of 2007 after high tides had washed away sand and experts from the USA visited the site to confirm there were no other examples of the aircraft in Europe as it was used extensively in the Pacific and over China-Burma-India by American pilots. However, bad weather and a lack of funding has left it where is crashed landed.

The Gwynedd Council’s maritime department has protected the site of the plane and refuse to reveal its exact location because there is still high-octane fuel in its tanks and they are afraid souvenir hunters will damage the aircraft.

Richard Gillespie from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has been trying to raise funds to rescue the aircraft. However, he has told the media:

Recovery awaits a home for the aircraft, preferably a major UK museum – but none have been willing to take it on due to space and funding constraints.

He also noted that attempts to rescue a Dornier DO-17 German bomber from the Goodwin Sands off the coast of Kent (see our post about it here) for eventual display in the RAF Museum is a similar challenge, but that involves a bigger aircraft upside down in 50 feet of water.

Richard and his team are also preparing to journey to Gardner Island in the Pacific this month to find clues of missing American aviation legend Amelia Earhart. After that project, TIGAHR will turn their attention back to the “Maid of Harlech” and try to secure funding to pull the buried plane from the Welsh sands.

Welsh engineer wants to recreate a pioneer flight that never was

Wales Online has profiled retired engineer Thomas Merlin Maddock who lives in the same Valleys house on Meadow Street, in Pontycymmer as pit carpenter and would-be aviator pioneer Christopher Carlyon did in 1904. Carlyon is not going to be a familiar name to aviation history buffs, but just months after the Wright brothers took to the air, the 17-year old started building his own flying machine in a shed he built 400 feet up a mountain near Bridgend called Coedcae.

His plan was to build a flying machine to glide across the Garw Valley at its narrowest point of about half a mile. However and after several tests on the slopes below his shed, it and the shed were destroyed by a violent storm in 1910.

Demoralised that his flying machine was destroyed before he could do a full fledged flight, Carlyon never returned to the project. Maddock only learned about the would-be aviator pioneer after his father attended the 59 year old Carlyon’s funeral in 1947.

Today and despite being 78-years old, Maddock, who has spent the last decade researching Carlyon’s plans, is taking up the challenge. He believes that Carlyon was inspired to build his flying machine after reading up on the Wright brothers and studying pictures of their aircraft. He also visited Carlyon’s who lent him a box full of glass slides to build prototypes first with a wingspan of 12 inches, then 24 inches and now eight feet

However, Maddock has no intention of taking the final craft for a test flight over the Garw Valley as he says that Carylon picked the most exposed part of south Wales and could have been killed trying to fly it there. Instead, he has found two pilots willing to fly the aircraft once its built, but it will be towed along on the ground to see if it lifts eight or 10 feet to prove this unsung local aviator pioneer right.

Merlin Maddock in his Pontycymer workshop with the 1/3-size replica of a glider first built by Christopher Carlyon, WalesOnline .

The Welsh Spitfire Museum is set to open on Sunday

Don’t have any plans for this coming Sunday? The Welsh Spitfire Museum near Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, Wales, is set to hold its open day starting at 10 am.

Expect to be entertained by the Army, Pembrokeshire’s Air Cadets, classic and vintage cars, bikes and tractors plus an original steam engine. For nostalgic attendees, there will Forties music from Sandy Sparkle and there is no need to bring a packed lunch as there will be a BBQ, and Salad Bar. In addition, a special ale called Welsh Roundel from the Gwaun Valley Brewery that was brewed just for the event will be available. Finally, the whole event will be watched over by the soldiers of the Glamorgan Home Guard.

The Welsh Spitfire Museum’s aim is to restore vintage aircraft and currently they are involved in the restoration of a MK VIII Spitfire that saw little action during the war and ended up in Australia.

The museum is open to visitors from 10 to 4 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Directions:
For the airport, take the A40 towards Fishguard.
The airfield entrance is two miles outside Haverfordwest on the right hand side (East).
[GPS Co-ordinates: 51.830706,-4.96951]

First World War flying Ace’s mementos are donated to St Fagans

Wales Online has reported the sons of a Cardiff pilot who survived 72 night bombing missions over the Western Front in World War I has donated his father’s medal to St Fagans National Museum.

Born in 1891 in Canton, Sergeant John Henry Matthews joined the military as a motorcycle dispatch rider in his late teens and he eventually enrolled as a squadron pilot in the Royal Flying Corps around the time when the average life expectancy for a pilot was a mere 11 days. Matthews completed 72 night bombing missions, sometimes doing several attacks in a single night, with his worst injury being a broken nose after a crash landing on a French airfield. He ultimately become a Second Lieutenant, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal at Cardiff City Hall in 1917, married in 1922 and died of cancer in 1968 at aged 77.

Son Ralph Matthews (aged 90) and Glyn Matthews (aged 85) decided it was best to share their father’s medal with others “rather than letting it gather dust” as “It seems a shame to hide it away.” The brothers also donated a fragment from their father’s FE2B plane, nicknamed “Cheerio,” along with a book of memoirs that record his experiences during the war.

The medal and other mementos will now be displayed at St Fagans National Museum as part of an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the First World War. In case you aren’t familiar with St Fagans, its considered one of Europe’s leading open-air museums that stands in the grounds of St Fagans Castle – a late 16th-century manor house donated by the Earl of Plymouth to the people of Wales. The Museum has been voted as one of the UK’s top ten free attractions by users of TripAdvisor.

Accident report faults pilot for severely damaging a Tiger Moth in Wales

Back in August, we noted the story of a Tiger Moth pilot who managed to walk away after clipping a tree and crash landing in Denbighshire in north-east Wales but now the official report by the Department for Transport’s Air Accident Investigation Branch is out about the incident and naturally the pilot does not come out looking very good in it.

To recap, the pilot had phoned a local named Pam, also a member of the Mold Camera Club, to ask who owned a field next to hers and whether he could use it to land. He later did a fly by of the field, flew a little lower for a second look and on the third attempt, clipped some trees because he could not pull up due to powerlines.

According to the official accident report as noted by the Wales Air Forum, the unnamed pilot had identified the field as a possible landing site three years earlier and he walked it twice on the morning of the accident which made him aware that it would be a difficult landing site approximately 200 yards long that steeply sloped upwards for its first half and less steeply for the second half. Moreover and at the northern end of the field, there was a “small earth bank, a low fence, two trees and power and telephone lines.” Hence:

It was evident to him any go-around decision would need to be made in good time and would require careful flying to avoid the wires and trees.
However as the pilot had recently completed a lengthy series of flights and had a good deal of recent flying practice he was confident a safe landing could be made.

When the incident happened, the pilot made a flypast and an initial approach that had to be abandoned because the aircraft was too fast. On the second attempt, the pilot crossed a hedge but he also became aware that he was not only too fast to safely land, he was also too low to climb above the obstacles at the other end of the field. Hence, he opened the throttle to maintain flying speed and fly between the trees but while concentrating on flying through the space between the fence and the wires, he instead hit tree branches with the aircraft’s right wing tip.

According to the accident report:

The pilot observed the choice of landing site was not a good one and he had not adhered to his own pre-flight plan to go-around if the approach was not entirely satisfactory.

Of course his observation was made after he severely damaged a 73-year old aircraft and nearly killed himself along with the mother of Pam who was standing in the spot he crashed a few moments before. No word on when or whether the aircraft will be flying again – along with the pilot…