Europe Trip #9: RAF Museum Hendon - 4 - Single piston/ radial/ rotary engines - even more

Ok, straight in to the pictures this time! Top to bottom are:

Gloster Gladiator
de Havilland DH60 Gypsy Moth
Messerschmitt Bf 109G [2 pictures]
Hawker Tempest
Hawker Dart

Europe Trip #7: RAF Museum Hendon - 2 - Single piston/ radial/ rotary engines

I've given a fair bit of through how to arrange these photos. By manufacturer? Type? Age? War? In the end, I'm going to group them pretty much as I came across them in the museum, except that I'll tend to put them in roughly into groups of single pistons, jets etc.

Please excuse the quality of the photos in this section. I'm shooting with a Canon EOS 450D [which is an awesome camera], but the lighting is designed for people to walk in and see more than to take photos! Using the flash doesn't often seem to work well either, but I'm sure you will agree, it's good to see these machines anyway!

This post contains some of the single engined piston aircraft I saw in the first couple of hangers. Top to bottom are:

Supermarine Spitfire F24 [x 2 pictures]
Hawker Typhoon 1B
Bristol Bulldog
Hawker Hart Trainer
Hawker Tempest II
Curtis Kittyhawk III

Europe Trip #6: RAF Museum Hendon - 1 - Introduction

Well, I'm back home in New Zealand now, and with the lasting effects of long distance travel almost gone, it's time to catch up on the photos form the trip.

This post is the first in a series of photos taken at the RAF Museum in Hendon. As you'll see over the next few days as I put the posts up, there was plenty here to keep me amused for the 5-6 hours I was there, and in fact it would have been better to spend a couple of days so that I didn't have to rush between some of the exhibits! After all my looking around, I didn't even get in to the hanger containing many of the WW1 exhibits which is a shame.

Getting to the the museum is super easy. The London Underground takes you very close - about a 10 minute, well sign-posted, walk to the museum after you get off the train. Entry to the museum is FREE [very surprising these days!], and even if I had had to pay it would have been worth it.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings and on to the pictures! The two gate guardians are fibreglass replicas of a Hawker Hurricane Mk II and a Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX. The museum [and apparently the RAF] use replicas for gate guardians to preserve the original aircraft in good condition. A good idea I think.

Following these are a quick taste of what is to come:

Hawker Tempest II
Westland Whirlwind HAR10
BAC Jet Provost T.5A
Hawker Siddeley Buccaneer S2B
Heinkel He 162