Museum wins grant to continue WW2 aircraft build

The Barracuda plane is being built using parts from crash sites

A World War Two plane, of which there is no surviving example anywhere in the world, is being rebuilt using old construction notes and parts from crash sites around the world.

It is part of a project at the Fleet Air Arm museum at RNAS Yeovilton, looking into the Barracuda aircraft, which has just won funding from the Archives Revealed project to uncover the plane's history.

Teams based at the museum have trawled through boxes of paperwork, to find design drawings and construction notes to help engineers piece the plane back together.

Dave Morris, the principal conservator of naval aircraft at the museum said he hopes the fuselage can be built in the next decade.

This Barracuda tail section was recovered from a mountain side in Scotland

The Barracuda was a carrier-borne torpedo and dive bomber, with about 2,600 of the aircraft made.

Mr Morris said: "There is no other Barracuda anywhere else in the world.

"The only one that will exist will be ours when we've finished rebuilding it."

So far, pieces have been recovered from a bog in Ireland, and a mountainside in Norway, with all pieces of wreckage needing special permission from the Ministry of Defence to be included in the rebuild.

"Everybody wants to know when we're going to have it finished and it's a very difficult one to estimate," Mr Morris said. "We are aiming to try and build the fuselage in 10 years."

One of the photos in the Fairey archive shows the Barracuda in flight.

Catherine Cooper is leafing through archive documents to help piece together the rebuilt Barracuda aircraft

The Archives Revealed programme has donated £50,000 towards the project to help sift though the large archive collection.

Lead curator Catherine Cooper said: "Until we actually open the boxes we just don't know what we're going to find."

She has been examining dozens of boxes holding paperwork that once belonged to the Fairey Aviation Company, which built the Barracudas.

When Ms Cooper finds anything relating to the Barracuda plane, she hands it over to the conservation engineering team who will use it to help them piece together the parts they have in storage.