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Old Jun 15, 2019, 1:34 am
  #15678  
WHBM
 
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: London, England.
Programs: BA
Posts: 8,476
Originally Posted by WHBM
There were 21 P&W and one Wright engined aircraft in the formation - and one other.

There's a clue in the photographs ...
I'll just round out this one.

That Malev (Hungarian Airlines) aircraft in the last photo is not a DC-3 at all, but a Lissunov Li-2 lookalike, with Shvetsov radial engines. Built in the Soviet Union during WW2, in parallel with the US DC-3 production, they did indeed buy some early DC-3s to go on, plus have all the engineering drawings, but these were all reworked to metric standard sizes as those were the tools and training they had. Fortunately, on the day we could wander the flightline and I had a good look at the aircraft and compared it with the DC-3 alongside. notable was the different standard of finish, particularly ends of metal being obviously hand-cut, and riveting at somewhat uneven intervals. The various metal joints are at different positions and the wings are a bit shorter. It's the only airworthy Li-2 left in the world, now belonging to a Hungarian museum.

The Li-2 assembly line was initially at Moscow but was one of those industries rapidly moved eastwards across the Soviet Union in WW2, and this aircraft was built in Tashkent, nowadays in Uzbekistan. The factory there was later used principally by Ilyushin to build the IL-62 etc.

I doubt many noticed on the day, but it was a bit of an ironic attendee, given that Hungary was on the German side in WW2, and on D-Day.

"LISUNOV LI-2 18433209"

184 = Soviet Aircraft plant 184 (Tashkent)
332 = Batch 332 (fairly late on in construction)
09 = Aircraft 9 (out of 10) in the batch
.

Last edited by WHBM; Jun 15, 2019 at 4:34 am
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