As I said when I started this thread, I spent the weekend 2000m up in the Jebel Akhdar mountains in Oman, on the Saiq plateau, to commemorate exactly 50 years since Owen Watkinson crashed there on 30/8/1958. It was odd that we were 8 people up there, including Owen from 8 Sqd, and it was 30/8/08. Lots of 8s.
The site is still much as I knew it 5 years ago, although the new road makes access much easier and there were too many local tourists jumping up and down on the engine casing for my liking. The nose cone has now disappeared, and graffiti is beginning to appear.
We took the opportunity to try to trace the line from the initial impact of the Venom before it dropped into the hollow where it lies today, with Owen's grave alongside. Indeed there are hundreds of pieces of aluminium in a line northward from the final resting place for about 500m, and also fragments of engine casing and armoured glass. Not far away is a large pile of rocks under which Owen was apparently buried initially by the local villagers before being reinterred where he is now alongside his plane. It is said that when the British authorities wanted to move his body to the cemetery in Muscat the locals objected, preferring to keep him where he is.
In view of the super new road up to the plateau there are many more people visiting the site, and I fear that what is left of the Venom will soon be degraded even more.
RIP Owen, in the very beautiful place where you have been already for 50 years
We also had a look at what is left of Saiq airstrip
http://www.pprune.org/aviation-histo...airport-4.html