Air Force hunt for Tomtit

Press, 16 February 1980, Page 1

Air Force hunt for Tomtit

A search for surviving parts of a World War II Hawker Tomtit has been started by the R.N.Z.A.F. Museum at the Wigram base. The museum has a tail plane for this 50-year-old aircraft and hopes that if the other bits can be found, restorers will have a handsome-old aircraft to display. The Hawker Tomtit, NZS3, was one of four similar aircraft bought in 1930 to serve as advanced pilot trainers. At a recent gathering of Air Force engineering officers, someone recalled that a Tomtit had been

given to the Reef ton Air Training Corps cadets during the war. The story came to the ears of Squadron Leader V. ' K. Barry, ■ the R.N.Z.A.F. - Museum director, at Wigram, who .immediately began to follow up the lead. Mr Jack Latham who trained A.T.C. boys at Reefton during the war, recalled the plane but thought it had gone to the Murchison A.T.C. . Subsequently he was able to discover not only that the Tomtit had indeed been used at Murchison, but that a -former A.T.C. officer now living in Col-

lingwood would be able to help. That officer, Mr George Masters, was tracked down and was most helpful. Apparently the NZS3 had been parked for a long time in a paddock next to Mr Masters’s house at Murchison and after the A.T.C. had finished with it, seemed to have “sort of just faded away.” Some say that cows were seen grazing on its fabric, others that it was stored for a long time in the Domain implements shed. Opinions differ also as to its final fate. Did

people gradually strip it, dr was it loaded on a truck and carted away? The “gradual stripping away” school of thought had" some credence because the museum has been given the under-car-riage of NZS3. As Squadron Leader Barry sees it, if the wheels were found in the West Coast-Nelson area, other pieces of the aircraft could still be around. The Hawker Tomtit was a biplane painted silvergrey over all, powered by an Armstrong Siddeley Mongoose 111 c, five cylinder radial engine.