The Bristol Bolingbroke restoration team at the Greenwood Military Aviation Museum (GMAM) has been beavering away over the last year, building new bomb bay doors, torn away April 28, 1943, when the aircraft made a forced belly-landing in a farmer’s field near Dafoe, Saskatchewan.
The museum’s aircraft, registered as tail number 9997, suffered an engine failure while performing circuits around the Bombing and Gunnery School in Dafoe; the pilot landed with the wheels up to prevent flipping the aircraft over in the soft ground. It saved his and his crewman’s lives, but it destroyed the underside of the fuselage. The forlorn aircraft ended up on the edge of a swamp for nearly 60 years, before being saved by the Reynolds Heritage Foundation of Wetaskiwin, Alberta.
In the fall of 2009, the foundation donated Boly 9997 to the GMAM, and it was trucked to the Annapolis Valley. The original wings were found to be corroded beyond repair; a second set was donated by Bomber Command Museum in Nanton, Alberta. The GMAM restoration team – comprised of Ian Patrick, Garry Brown and team leader Dan Daigle – has been at it ever since.
The past year’s focus has been on making and fitting the complex structure of the eight bomb bay doors. The team first made a wooden buck to mimic the underside frame of the fuselage, then used the up-righted buck to shape and fit new doors without having to work under the aircraft. The painstaking process of recreating the doors involved fabricating curved plywood cores, sandwiched between inner and outer aluminum skins. Thousands of screws were then added in an authentic pattern to hold the pieces together.
The doors were finally hung this past April, 81 years to the month when they were first torn off on that fateful day in 1943. The icing on the cake will be to mount the two 500-pound replica bombs, also ingeniously fabricated by Daigle.
Bolingbrokes provided training for pilots, gunners, navigators and bomb aimers as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, and were used as target tugs, pulling drogues for Mosquito and Hurricane pilot training at RCAF Station Greenwood. Don’t miss your chance to come out and experience the rich history of your air force, including the Bolingbroke, during our Wings & Wheels RCAF Centennial Car Show July 27, when all our aircraft will be open for tours. In case of rain, the show will be postponed to July 28.
