Pasted fromBarry Clay's excellent website
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Barry writes in response to the limited market/ low prices for this classic wooden twin -
'Its strange how things change. Whenthe Miles Gemini was in production, it was the last word in twin engined private owner aircraft. Now, with all these American twins with heaps of power the little old Gemini nobody wants.
Percy Blamire used to love his G-ALZG,a bronze coloured machine which he raced each year in the Kings Cup Air Race. He bent it a few times and on one occasion a Hornet Moth taxied right into it ripping into the fuselage,another occasion he had a bad bird strike and had to make a single engined landing luckily just making Bagintons threshold. ( I too had a single- engined Gemini approach into Old Warden last season when one of the props fell off! - HP)
The aircraft went eventually to Russell Winn in Ireland (famous for his remote submarines) who was tragically killed when the entire tail assembly detached itself in the air. Russell had a few Geminis including the rare Aries G-AOGA which he purchased from the Rapide group at Baginton.
I can tell you all now that there was very little of the 'original' G-
ALZG in this machine,most of it was ex G-ALMU with parts from no less than four other aeroplanes incorporated into her.
Alvis did a total rebuild of the airframe,when Percy used to give her the gun before he flew her,the aircrafts tail would shake and I often wonder whether this ground resonance did some damage to the airframe in later years and caused that terrible break up in the air and subsequent crash ?
( I have a theory here. One should never push or/ lift the Messenger/ Gemini tail. We found a crack attributable to poor ground - handling on Messenger 'KBO and this seriously weakened the stbd. side tailplane attachment. The vertical former in front of the tailplane relies on total skin adhesion for tailplane rigidity and we found a crack between the two parts - all model plane stuff only 1/1 scale! THe only external evidence was that one side of the tailplane seemed more flexible than the other.A simple repair but nevertheless one that would certainly have propogated if it hadn't been spotted on the CofA 3 yrs. ago. - HP)
Several Geminis were used for air racing and at one time it was a
fairly common machine at airfields,slowly they are getting rarer but lets hope the Skysport example gets a good caring owner to look after her for generations to see flying.
(((Sir John Allison, Adrian Brook and Jim Buckingham have 3 excellent airworthy examples in the UK. With a fourth in Sweden and a fifth in Belgium - plus shed-loads of spares all over the place, these fine machines are not endangered. The skills required to fly these old twins are quite different. You have zero single-engined performance at anything other than minimum weight thanks to the good old Cirrus Minors (the Gipsy-powered version was a better machine but none are flying) - . Couple this with the tailwheel UC configuration, the cost of ownership/ restoration v residual value and it don't stack up for many - HP)))
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THanks to Barry for these fascinating anecdotes.
HP