Survivors
After retirement in December 1943, all but one of the surviving Whirlwinds were sent to 18 Maintenance Unit at Dumfries, Scotland, where they were scrapped. The sole exception, P7048 was retained by Westland, and was granted a civil certificate of airworthiness on 10 October 1946, with the registration G-AGOI. It was used as a company hack for a short time before being withdrawn in 1947 and scrapped.
In October 1979, the remains of Whirlwind P6966, the first Whirlwind to be lost, were recovered near Grangemouth by enthusiasts in a dig group. The two Peregrine engines were recovered, as well as many pieces of the airframe. A UK group are currently building a full scale replica Whirlwind, with the intention to have it ground running.
Plans for a 2/3 scale replica were marketed for home building in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the Butterworth Westland Whirlwind.
Read more about this topic: Westland Whirlwind (fighter)
Famous quotes containing the word survivors:
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how to handle their parents. They see that their parents are traumatized: they scream and don’t react normally.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)