Originally Posted by
CUTiger78
I find it a bit troubling that the "flight engineer" only held a student pilot certificate.
There is absolutely no requirement to be a "Pilot" to be a Flight Engineer, at least UK wise. indeed the average Flight Engineer will have more knowledge about the aircraft and it's systems than a pilot will normally ever have, I seem to remember in the distant past to convert my Engineering Licences to those of a Flight Engineers was only a few weeks.
Chug,
These vintage aircraft were built to military airworthiness standards that have long since become obsolete. Is it time to consider the wisdom of keeping them flying at all, let alone carrying fare paying passengers?
A Lancaster as you mentioned it as with other types were converted and operated on the UK Civil Register, the Lanc as the Lancastrian, indeed they even manufactured the York, that was a variant of the Lancaster with a different fuselage operating as an airliner or freighter with the likes of Dan Air amongst others..
The same went of a myriad of ex military types such as the Halifax, Sunderland, etc.
You probably haven't seen the amount of work that goes into rebuilding these things, I have and I can assure you some of the current aircraft flying, Spitfires etc are probably built to a higher standard that they ever were during the war, indeed when you see a Spitfire flying today with a war record as long as your arm, bare in mind that all tha is essentially required to rebuild a Spitfire is pretty much the original dataplate, and even that may get replaced!