De Havilland DH-89 Dragon Rapide - Shuttleworth Collection - May 2013

[HubertB]

Some of you may know that I had initiated the project of releasing a 1/32 resin kit of the DH-89 Dragon Rapide. The project went as far as having a master created, then life, business and the ancillary choices associated with both came in the way.

To cut a long story short, the - huge - step of moving from master to kit never came to fruition, all of my (un)doing . And then, Lukasz, of Lukgraph, had the very good idea of releasing its own kit, which was done last year, which folded definitely my project. Such is life ...

In the preparation phase for this project, I, and the modeller producing the master, Martin Field, asked the Shuttleworth collection if we coud come, measure and photograph their Dragon Rapide, to which they graciously agreed, all for the price of just two entry tickets. I thank them again for their excellent welcome.

We were able to crawl around, in and out of the Dragon Rapide, me with a camera, and Martin with a measuring tape, tees and squares.

Attached is the link to the walkaround of the Shuttleworth Dragon Rapide I did that day, all 421 pics of it (which is why I did not download them directly on this site)

I hope you will enjoy it.

Hubert

https://hubertboillot.smugmug.com/De-Havilland-DH-89-Dragon-Rapide-walkaround

[HubertB]

When reviewing the pics, some of them are actually not relevant for the DH-89.

The day we visited, they happened to have in the same hangar DH-86 Comet G-ACSS, the London-Melbourne race winner, going through some maintenance. So I took pics as well. The red wing, and all pics of black-enamelled retracting undercarriage are for the Comet, not the Dragon Rapide. I'll leave them as they are interesting as well, IMHO.

So that makes 410 pics of the Rapide, and 11 of the Comet

Hubert