I was present at Bovingdon one day in 1963 during the filming of '633'; me and a mate put on our ATC Cadet uniforms ostensibly to scrounge a flight with Southern Communications Sqdn; while sitting in the lounge waiting for a flight with other ATC cadets, Donald Houston walked in!
I counted 12 Mossies there, one of them being just a fuselage on a trailer.
We missed the sequence where they deliberately wrecked one of the aircraft although we did go over the previous day to see what they had done to it; amazing that the 'bullet holes' were actually bits of stuck on plywood but you could only tell the difference from about 2 feet away!
Stood behind the camera during the shooting of the scene where Donald and Cliff Robertson were about to depart on the raid; those arc lights were hot but it was actually shot in simulated darkness.
There is a scene in '633' which was repeated in 'Mosquito Squadron' with a Mossie landing on runway 02 and as the camera panned round, you can see a line of Ansons in the distance all with their shiny white tops! At the end of the second film, there was an Anson painted in camouflage colours as well as the others.
After 633, one Mosquito remained at Bovingdon for several years, only flying out (after a hole had been drained in the tailplane to drain out the water) in late 1967; it remained in the first hangar on the left parked along with our gliders (we did several detachments at Bovingdon from Halton during this period) and on one occasion we all climbed in it.
I saw 633 on TV a few months ago; amazing what I missed; there was a freshly painted helicopter landing circle where the aircraft parked and as the camera panned round, I saw a long wheelbase Landrover parked near the hangars; neither of these existed during WW2 of course.
Last edited by chevvron; 7th Sep 2022 at 12:52.