For many years the Auster (nee British Taylorcraft) concern provided the Royal Air Force, and the Army Air Corps, with a splendid series of Air Observation Post aircraft. The science of ‘spotting for guns’ and army liason work is not an easy one, but the Austers (Latin for ‘warm southerly breeze’) were brilliant at their job. All the way through WW2 and the Korean and Malayan conflicts you could find one or other of the various marks of Auster at work. The AOP.9 you can see here was powered by a Blackburn Cirrus Bombardier engine putting out about 180 hp, and capable of running on British Army 'mogas', if necessary, so it could land in a field near any Army unit and get refuelled, if necessary. Auster AOP.9 aircraft were also exported, and as well as being used by the RAF and Army Air Corps, they were flown by the South African Air Force, the Indian Army, the Indian Air Force and the Royal Hong Kong Auxiliary Air Force.
The AOP.9 is a singularly angular aircraft – hardly a curve in sight – but a real workhorse in the roughest of conditions. Here we see XN441 (civilian registration, G-BGKT) moving down the flightline at the Great Vintage Flying Weekend, at Abingdon. This aircraft was once owned by no less a personage than Wing Commander Kenneth Horatio Wallis, MBE, CEng, FRAeS, RAF (Ret’d), who designed and flew some of the most amazing autogyros (including a Wallis WA-116, ‘Little Nellie’, in the James Bond film, ‘You Only Live Twice’, in which he performed all the stunt flying).
In the late 1950s, the Army Air Corps took control of their own aircraft from the RAF - rather as the Royal Navy had done in 1939 with the Fleet Air Arm - and decided to focus on battlefield helicopters instead of fixed-wing aircraft. The Auster company hurriedly built a prototype AOP.11, a heavily modified AOP.9 with a 260 hp Continental IO-470-D, in a last-ditch attempt to stop the Army's rotary winged revolution, but despite being exhibited at the Farnborough Air Show in September, 1961, carrying the Army serial 'XP254', their strenuous sales efforts came to nothing. The AOP.11 is, I’m sorry to say, no longer with us; after being sold into private hands in 1971, it used to regularly attend rallies and fly-ins, but suffered a major accident in 2007 and the remaining parts are now in storage.
Whatever you thought of the Auster's looks, you had to admit that it really got the job done!
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