VH-AQU
de Havilland D.H.84
Dragon (c/n 2048)
One tends to forget that the Dragon was designed to have
folding wings. Here, VH-AQU has
the starboard wing
folded. It was probably being brought out of the hangar and
readied for flight.
The idea being, of
course, to reduce hangar space. About the only aircraft designed
this way today
are shipboard
fighters. The venue or time of this photograph is not known, but
it was probably
Bankstown. Also
unknown is why the Anson in the hangar is up on its nose!
In the 1960s it was
owned by Sid Marshall and
below is a shot of it in Marshall
Airways - Charter Service livery.
taken by John
Hopton at Bankstown in October 1963 (via Geoff Goodall). Aviation
enthusiast
Robert St. John of
Adelaide then acquired the Dragon from the estate of the late Sid
Marshall and
shot # 3 taken by
Nigel Daw (again via Geoff Goodall) shows it at Broken Hill, NSW in
March
1980 while the image
at the foot of the page (# 4, Nigel again) shows it at Mt. Gambier, SA
in a
Coca-Cola advertising
paint job. (Sadly, Rob St. John passed away in December
2008).
Anyway, VH-AQU was
later
purchased by
the original manufacturer, now named Hawker de
Havilland,
re-registered VH-DHX and returned
to the place of its birth at Bankstown in 1986.
It was acquired in the
new
millennium by
the Norman Aeroplane Trust (Torquil Norman) at Chil-
bolton in the U.K .in
whose care it is still
airworthy. It is currently registered G-ECAN. There
are many lovely shots of it
as it
now appears in full Railway Air Services livery on the Internet.
Merely Google "G-ECAN Dragon".
