Monthly Archives: April 2016

I’ve just finished transcribing the E/E.88 Aircraft History Card for A17-370.  It’s all hand-written and the quality of the scan I have is very poor, but it allowed me to put together a concise timeline of where it was throughout the war.

Starting from the top.

A17-370 was built by de Havilland Aircraft Pty Ltd.  It was delivered to No. 2 Aircraft Depot on 5/24/1941 with Engine Number 193, at RAAF Base Richmond, N.S.W.  A month later it was sent to Canberra for storage.  It was finally assigned to No. 1 Elementary Flying Training School on 9/6/1941 located at Parafield Aerodrome near Adelaide, South Australia.

It was received in early September of 1941 and flew off its first 240 hour maintenance period in about three months.  Now unfortunately the meanings of many of the abbreviations and status codes use on this document have been lost, but if I’m reading this right it accumulated about 2400 flying hours total with No. 1 E.F.T.S.

By the end of its second maintenance period they noted that the engine was U/S, which means unserviceable.  However, I’m a bit puzzled because it kept being put back on the flight line.  They made that note three times over a year of flying.  I don’t know if they were replacing or servicing the engine each time, or what.  The duration of each maintenance period was always exactly 7 days, like clockwork.

As soon as they fixed the engine problem (presumably by installing the engine currently in the airplane, a British-built Gipsy Major from 1939), the wings were damaged and then repaired.  This brings us to the end of 1942.

In mid-1943 it was shipped to Victorian & Interstate Airways, a civilian contractor, for a complete overhaul.  By my math this was about 1800 hours, give or take… very close to the 2000 hour mark.  At V.I.A. it was completely rebuilt, re-covered and test flown.  This process took 49 days at Essendon, near Melbourne.  After all that work, A17-370 should have had another smooth 2000 hours ahead, more than enough to finish out the war.  But it wasn’t to be.

On February 28, 1944, a visiting Tiger Moth (A17-695) taxiied nose-first into A17-370.  The damage was noted in its history card but most of the handwriting is impossible to read.  I know that the interplane struts are mentioned, but that’s about it.  It was recommended to be repaired at Parafield by the line mechanics of 1 E.F.T.S., rather than sending it off to a depot.  I suspect this is when a lot of the damage to the cowling was done, and why it was roughly welded back together.  They worked fast, and she was back in the air only a week after the incident.

At this point No. 1 E.F.T.S. was relocated to Tamworth, N.S.W. and was gradually being phased out.  A17-370 only accumulated about 500 hours since her major overhaul at V.I.A. before the war ended for her.  On September 15, 1944, No. 1 E.F.T.S. was shut down, and by December it had been gutted and the aircraft remained behind in the care of a Care and Maintenance Unit at Tamworth.

A17-370 was stored until June 7, 1946 (less cylinder heads, apparently) when she was offered for sale.  She was sold to the Associated Aero Clubs of Australia for £100 among a whole batch of other Tiger Moths.  Unlike most of those, however, she was never civil-registered in Australia, instead remaining in storage until being shipped to India in 1949.

So that’s the narrative version, here’s the direct transcription, along with my own translations of each line and the location where it would have been at that point.