Just about a year ago, a
Dornier Do 17 bomber was recovered from the English Channel. It is currently the only intact example of its type to be found anywhere. (That's for a given value of 'intact' to be sure.) I wrote up the initial recovery efforts
back in May 2013. Now it's time for an update.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
The BBC's Jon Hunt has a news report on the progress to date. The video at the link shows the painstaking work needed to save what has spent decades under sea water in the muck. Not the least problem has been coping with the marine life that colonized the wreck, or as a further report by Nick Higham relates, the smell as it dies off.
When it arrived at Cosford it weighed nine tonnes, but only about 5.5 tonnes of that was the aircraft. The rest was sand, seaweed and barnacles.
Once out of the sea and in the warmth and light of the tunnels much of that sea life started to decay and rot.
"In the early weeks it was really unpleasant in here," recalls Mick Shepherd, Cosford's training and development manager.
"It wasn't difficult to be physically sick, it was a sort of reflex action because it was that bad. The smell was appalling.
"One of the girls... when she went home one night her mother wouldn't let her in the house, she smelt that bad, and hosed her down in the garden."
As the article details, the restoration work has been challenging. Chemical treatments to preserve the aluminum parts of the aircraft have to be carried out without damaging the steel components. Keeping the rinse solutions flowing through the wreck has been tricky, getting it into inner areas, dealing with the growth of persistent marine algae, and so on.
Those hoping for a compete restoration will have to be disappointed. There's a lot of damage to the airframe from the crash and the decades in the ocean.
One thing is clear, it will not have been restored or reconstructed - it is too far gone for that.
And as Ian Thirsk, the museum's head of collections and the man overseeing the whole operation says: "If you were to restore it you couldn't call it a genuine Dornier 17 anymore. It would be a facsimile. There wouldn't be that iconic link to the past, that crucial part of British history."
So, the remains will be turned the right way up - the wreck is still lying on its back, as it was when found.
And the museum plans to reconstruct the lost canopy frame and the glazing assembly in the plane's nose, its beetle eye, which is one of the things that made the Dornier so recognisable.
"We'd like to recreate those to help the visitor interpret the object," Mr Thirsk says.
But in essence visitors will see only what came up from the bed of the English Channel, a battered and poignant relic of World War Two, along with the human story it tells.
There are additional BBC video reports
here,
here,
here,
here,
here and
here, in chronological order.