Survivors
No Hampdens remain in flying condition today, although two wrecks are in the process of being restored:
- Hampden I P1344
- Recovered from a crash-site in Russia in 1991, the aircraft is being reconstructed at the Michael Beetham Conservation Centre at the Royal Air Force Museum Cosford. During the Second World War, it served with No. 144 Squadron RAF, part of Coastal Command. In September 1942, the squadron was transferred to the Kola Peninsula in northern Russia to help protect the Arctic convoys. While in transit over Finland, P1344 accidentally flew close by a German airfield and was shot down by two scrambled Messerschmitt Bf 109s. It crashed in a wooded area of the Kola Peninsula, three crew members were killed and two taken prisoner. After its recovery by another party, the RAF Museum gained ownership of the aircraft in 1992.
- Hampden, P5436
- This aircraft has been reconstructed largely from parts of the last Canadian-built example, ditched on a training flight in November 1942 when the pilot lost control after a practice torpedo drop. The remains were recovered from 600 ft of water in Saanich Inlet on Vancouver Island in 1989. Along with recovered components from two other Hampden crashes in Canada, as of 2007, the reconstruction was about 97 per cent complete. The aircraft was to become the showpiece exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Flight at Langley, British Columbia, in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver.
- In January 2009, a heavy snowfall snapped off the aircraft's left wing. Despite the efforts of Museum staff to clear the accumulating snow, the wing's internal structure failed and the wing separated from the fuselage, falling on to a display case containing one of the aircraft's original engines. The wing suffered considerable damage and there was additional damage to the tail and propeller. The wing had largely been restored using wood parts because most of the metal parts of the wing structure had been eroded, so it did not possess the structural integrity of the original aircraft. The museum is currently seeking donations to repair the aircraft.As of 2011, the repair includes the mating of the wing and propeller to the fuselage and engine.
- The Wings Aviation Museum in the United Kingdom owns the wings and tail of "P1273"; the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre is currently restoring the forward fuselage of AE436. Both of these were also 144 Squadron aircraft, lost during the transfer to Russia. The former, "P1273" was shot down by mistake by Soviet fighters over Petsamo. The latter was lost over Sweden, its remains discovered in a remote region by hikers in 1976.
Read more about this topic: Handley Page Hampden
Famous quotes containing the word survivors:
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how to handle their parents. They see that their parents are traumatized: they scream and don’t react normally.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)