ROYAL Air Force engineers are set to dig up Kenley Airfield as part of a secret mission to uncover its wartime past.
The project has been kept under wraps because bosses fear a swathe of metal detector-wielding plane enthusiasts will move in before them.
Archaeologists from the Ministry of Defence Fire Training School, in Manston, Kent, will help excavate a patch of the historic site believed to be an old aircraft dump.
Starting on August 7, it is hoped the dig will solve the 50-year-old mystery of what lies beneath the former RAF base.
Bomb disposal teams have carried out a subterranean survey of the World War Two site in preparation for the excavation.
It is thought that legendary aeroplanes such as Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes, the two fighters that won the Battle of Britain, are buried there.
It is also rumoured that an old Avro Lincoln bomber - a high-altitude four-engined plane not used in the war - was left at the site.....
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Chris Baguley,chairman of the Friends of Kenley Airfield, said: "Who knows what's in there. They're going to be digging up old scrap buried a long time ago.
"It could be bits of an old tip or it could be something tangible. Maybe even an important piece of military history.
"The RAF wants to dispel all the myths about what is down there by finding out about the planes.What happened then we don't know and it will be very interesting to find out."
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Squadron leader Keith Chandler, of the 615 Volunteer Gliding Squadron, said: "In the 1950s the RAF used a number of out-of-service fighter planes there, including Spitfires and Hurricanes, for fire training.
"In the early 80s one of them surfaced and was taken away but the rest have been buried there for years. I think the RAF wants to keep it quiet, though, because the last thing they want is a legion of people with metal detectors digging up the land before they get there."
Wing Commander David Lainchbury, the commandant at the fire training school, said ......."The site survey revealed three or four large, unusual shapes which may be aircraft fuselage. Earth-moving equipment will be used initially in the excavation, while air training corps members will then be involved in the hand-dig. "It would then be up to the Corporation of London, which owns the land, to determine what to do with any interesting findings."
http://iccroydon.icnetwork.co.uk/news/croydon
Why on earth would you want a bury an aircraft the size of a Lincoln
