Military aircraft identification - please

[fmansam]

Hi there

John, if you look at your avatar and the aircraft image shown below it, telling you amount of posts etc.....

spookily it's also a Victor like the one in your picture!!!

[DaveB]

Nice one Neil.. I'd not noticed that. Here he was a Victor all the time and didn't know it

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[Tomb]

yup i doubt the date of the picture as 70's since the victors became tankers circa 1965, so it cant be 70's except for the last of the tanker conversions, (from the SR's)

dont forget the pod is role equipment, perhaps fitted at the sqn maint level, or that picture is in the 60's

better view of the wing tips would tell you for sure, the tankers had thiers clipped

[DispatchDragon]

I remember seeing white Victors becoming camoflage at Radlett - I went up and down that railway line from Harrow-Wealdstone going to london on the tube
in the early 60s and there always seemed to be Victors parked out there

ten years later it was a graveyard

Hey John want there an Engine Works not far from there?

I wanted to say Neasden


Leif

[johnhinson]

Thanks for the further input chaps - no I hadn't noticed I am a "Victor"!

Leif - I'm not sure if there is some confusion - if you travelled past Radlett airfield you wouldn't have gone to Harrow & Wealdstone as they are on different lines but there are (or were) plenty of large engine depots on both lines.

Given the interest, here is another view - albeit of even lesser quality as it is even more zoomed in - of this good fellow making his grand departure. I get the impression his "full English" awaits him at wherever he is going . . .



Some further titbits from my memories and from recollections of other staff I worked with.

On the picture you can see the truncated trackbed of an old branch line which served Sylvester's Farm. This line was obliterated by the runway extension for larger aircraft in World War II. I cannot find the farm on any map so I assume the farm was obliterated too.

During the Second World War, an aircraft missed the runway and crashed on the railway line south of the signal box. With the essential need to reopen the railway quickly, a good proportion of the aircraft was buried by filling in the pit it had made. I would assume these bits remain there today - something for the future industrial archaeologist to discover!

We had an alarm bel and telephone to the Control Tower for such emergencies.

After closure of the airfield it was used heavily for vehicle storage. London Transport had a load of not very old but pretty useless buses that were stored there by the hundred awaiting buyers. I could just see them as dots because they were at the far end, but a friend who worked for LT said that when a batch had been delivered the favourite game was to race about ten, side by side, down the runway. He said he for ever will remember a noisy departure and clouds of smoke . . . ten would disappear in a dip but only nine would come up the other side! The dead one would later be pushed roughly back to its parking spots by one of the others and nobody would say a thing.

There was also a firm there that sold much older double-deckers to the USA, but I never saw any of their activities.

At my end of the runway, imported cars were stored in quantity - Toyotas, I think. Many didn't move for 18 months and I wondered how many people would not be so proud of their new toy if they new it had stood in the open for so long.

These days there is an industrial estate where Handley Page's buildings would have been but most of the airfield seems untouched although the runway is disappearing under grass. I have been into that estate on business but there are no buildings there there that look at all airfield-related to me.

Hope this hasn't bored you.

John

[Garry Russell]

Cheers
John

Those sort of personal experiences are always a good read

Garry

[Motormouse]

Indeed Garry, one of my (distant) relatives was employed in
the Flight Test dept at Radlett,....bout time someone put it back on the (FS) map

ttfn

Pete

[Garry Russell]

The kind of memories that John posted above give a picture that is seldom found officially

Records show how things were set up and give the polished view of proud owners or sometimes the strong views of those who were against the goings on at places.

These are every day memories of how things really were and are vital to get a real feel for a place.....official record are cold.

The pic of the Victor taxying and more so the take of are not techinically leading edge, but they are just how most people would remember them.

I can feel the warmth of the hazy summer sunshine and the angles remind of a time when you could see these things couild be see just doing a daily job

I love that sort of pic..........no fuss, no pose, but very much the sort of veiws we remember so well

Garry

[DispatchDragon]

John

Then the Harrow on the Hill metropolitan line? I know it waas when we lived in Harrow - sometimes the memory fails - it was 45 years ago

Leif

But I know the line went right alongside the runway - I went looking for aircraft crashes at Radlett - the only one I found which specifically
mentioned hitting the railway lines was a Canberra B2 which crashed on the approach in 1954 and the wreckage came to rest of the railway
however somewhere I believe I have seen a photo of a York I believe sitting on the railway lines there. I can't find any reference to it.


Leif

[johnhinson]

Then the Harrow on the Hill metropolitan line? I know it waas when we lived in Harrow - sometimes the memory fails - it was 45 years ago

Leif

But I know the line went right alongside the runway

I'm thinking hard about this, yes the airport and runway fits the bill but the railway route doesn't seem to. That line runs St Albans - Radlett - Elstree - Mill Hill - Hendon and into St Pancras in London. Interestingly it also passed close to the Hendon airport and factory and there was a little branch line into it during the First War. Maybe you changed trains somewhere or bussed? Amazing coincidence - I lived in Harrow for 33 years but finished digging my escape tunnel a couple of years ago.

John