Mynarski Lancaster Visit

In February 2014, the Royal Air Force Battle of Britain Memorial Flight and the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, owners and operators of the last two airworthy Avro Lancaster bomber aircraft in the world, jointly announced that the two aircraft would be brought together for a six week UK tour over August and September in a major historic milestone for the vintage and iconic aircraft that will likely never happen again.

The Canadian Lancaster, registered C-GVRA and marked KB726/VR-A (but is actually FM216) is dedicated to Pilot Officer Andrew Mynarski who served with No. 419 Squadron RCAF at RAF Middleton St. George, now Durham Tees Valley Airport. He died after his aircraft was shot down on a mission from here whilst trying to rescue a trapped crew member, who ironically went on to survive the crash.

Given the historical significance of the aircraft to Durham Tees Valley Airport, several parties, including airport owners Peel, campaigned hard to have our airport included in the tour programme, and the Canadians were only too happy to oblige.

Initially, we were supposed to be the first port-of-call for the Canadian Lancaster on its way in to the UK albeit only in the form of a fly-past, however this was cancelled when the aircrafts planned route into the UK took it down the west coast. On the day however, it did in the end come down the east coast with the intention of performing the fly-past as originally planned, sadly however poor weather prevented it and the aircraft proceeded straight to RAF Coningsby. It did pass close enough to the airport to be seen.

Arrival Day - Wednesday 27th August

The Lancaster arrives on runway 23 following a fly-past.

The Lancaster arrived at 1706 from Humberside as "Heritage 1" having performed a fly-past prior to landing. There were hundreds of people at the airport to greet her, mostly at the layby's at either end of the runway, with many at the fence-line behind stand 5RR, where she parked nose-in.

After meeting the aircraft on arrival, we helped get her tucked in to Hangar 1 for the evening before assisting the airport to host some VIP guests who came to take a look at the famous aircraft.

Click here for the full arrival day photo album.

Open Day - Thursday 28th August

The public enjoy the Lancaster.

The main car park was due to open at 10am although we arrived at 8am to find people already trying to get in to car park B on the grass area behind the St. George Hotel! The hotel had their own ceremony between 1030 - 1130 and the first visiting aircraft - an RAF Hawk T1A from Leeming (XX280/CM) - arrived at 1016 to join Cobham Falcon 20 G-FRAJ, Vans RV-4 G-MUMY, National Police Air Service Eurocopter EC135 G-CPAS, Skydive St. George Gippsland GA-8 Airvan G-SCOL, Durham Tees Flight Training PS-28 Cruiser and Slingsby T67M Firefly II G-DTFT and G-BUUJ, Great North Air Ambulance AS365 Dauphin G-NHAA and a replica Spitfire marked BR954/JP-A. Yak-52 G-TYAK arrived at 1044 to join the static and the main attraction, Lancaster B.X C-GVRA was towed from Hangar 1 to the static display at around 11am.

A significant events 'arena' was set-up in the former short-stay car park which included various stalls, including our own FoDTVA stand, food vans, emergency vehicles including an airport fire tender, vintage vehicles, a Punch and Judy show and the official Thwaites Brewery Lancaster Tour merchandise vehicle amongst others. A Police Dogs demonstration team turned up mid-afternoon after having to deal with a call-out earlier in the day.

At 1130, Gate 02 was opened up to allow the public access to the aircraft as well as stalls from Durham Tees Flight Training and Skydive St. George, BBC Radio Tees were also located here, broadcasting live from the event. The Lancaster was supposed to be admired from the outside, but due to a printing error in one of the local newspapers, visitors were under the impression you could go inside, luckily the Lancaster crew obliged, and a two-hour wait to get in quickly formed!

Over the course of the day, it was hoped two Typhoons would perform practice approaches, but due to an unexpected deployment to the Middle East, we had to settle for overshoots from a Leeming Hawk and a Linton-on-Ouse Tucano. Although the Skydive St. George Airvan managed to out-do both of these after returning from the first of two para-drops with a very low and fast fly-past.

At 1445, the Lancaster was moved out of the static area and one at a time the four Merlin engines were fired up, it departed at 1508 and performed what can only be described as jaw dropping south-north and west-east fly-pasts over its namesake, the Mynarski statue outside of the St. George Hotel. It returned to thunderous applause at 1517 and re-entered the static park. A second planned fly-past at 5pm didn't go ahead in the end.

At around 6pm, the aircraft was towed back to Hangar 1, and the FoDTVA volunteers jumped on-board with the Canadian crew for the short but surprisingly thrilling 'ride' back to hangar, during this, it occured to us that we may have broken a record for most people inside of a Lancaster post-WWII, but sadly upon further research we only equalled it at 28 people!!

Whilst we didn't break the record, I personally achieved a world 1st with a Lancaster bomber - I completed an "Ice Bucket Challenge" with the help of the crew!! If you're not familiar with this charitable 'craze' that's doing the rounds at the moment I'll let Google do the explaining but basically I had been nominated a couple of days prior and saw my opportunity to put a truly unique spin on the challenge, and at the time of writing the video has had 50,000+ hits!! The video can be found below.

Click here for the full open day album.

The Engine Failure - Friday 29th August

Smoke is seen coming from the no.4 engine.

Whilst on a demonstration flight for some VIPs on the morning after the open day, a 'supercharger' failure caused the shut-down of the No.4 engine. A significant amount of smoke can be seen in the photos coming out of the effected engine. The aircraft was hangared and its weekend obligations reluctantly cancelled.

Click here for photos from the Friday.

Engine Change - Saturday 30th August - Wednesday 3rd September

Michael and Colin assist Rick Rickards of the CWHM with the sick engine.

Both the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre (owners of Lancaster B.VII NX611/LE-C "Just Jane") and the RAF BoBMF offered to loan a replacement engine to the Canadian Lancaster, the BoBMF engine was accepted as it was closer to being ready for installation, although modifications still had to be made as the Canadian Lancaster is powered by Packard Merlin engines as opposed to the Rolls-Royce Merlins used by the two British examples. The Packard Merlins are more powerful and a number of conversions had to be made to the Rolls-Royce Merlins which necessitated the stripping-down of the sick No.4 engine so that its components could be retrofitted to the loaned engine. The fault was the failure of a component called the "Supercharger" and according to the engineers this is a component that simply should never fail and it's being put down to the higher workload the Lancaster is experiencing as part of the UK tour combined with overly-aggressive fly-pasts such as the one we enjoyed on Thursday. The flight crew are going to take it easy from here on out.

Over the four days the aircraft was grounded, a number of volunteers from the Friends of Durham Tees Valley Airport assisted with the engine change, we thought we would be general dogs-bodies but we were very hands on and played a major role in removing and stripping down the sick engine, we saved a very grateful Canadian engineering team an estimated 200-400 man-hours!!

FoDTVAs new mascot, aptly named "Vera"!

CWHM engineers Rick Rickards and Craig Brookhouse.

The damaged Supercharger.

Full credit to the Canadians they never once lost their temper or showed any signs of frustration despite working very long hours and with very limited equipment. They became very deflated on the Tuesday evening when the aircraft was towed outside for an engine test but the new no.4 failed to start - the prop span but it failed to 'catch'. Luckily, it was only a minor fault, with it being a new engine some more priming was needed to pump fuel through it, there was also a slight fault with a switch of some description.

Despite the unfortunate reason for the extended stay with us, we were very glad to have her here and were very sad to see her go! I'm sure I speak for the entire FoDTVA team when I say it has been an absolute honour and priviledge to be so heavily involved in such a historic and world-famous aircraft. One of our members, Paul Tasker, even managed to win one of four seats the Canadian crew made available as part of a prize draw on the test flight on the Wednesday morning!! We would like to wish our new friends the best of luck for the remainder of the UK tour and beyond, and we don't rule out looking in to a group visit to their museum in Canada at some point in the future!!

Click here for photos from the Saturday.

Click here for photos from the Sunday.

Click here for photos from the Wednesday.

Video

Thursday 28th August - Chris Smith Ice Bucket Challenge (Michael McNeil)

Friday 29th August - Taxi-out and departure (Steve Curtis):

Note the no.4 engine is shut-down prior to departure.

Durham Tees Valley tends to get lucky when it comes to major historical events such as this - here's to the next one!


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