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Old 31st March 2009 | 13:18
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astir 8
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Joined: Feb 2002
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From: Inverness-shire
They were certainly cheating in that wartime "bomber in a weekend" film - those big sections of pre-assembled geodetic panels would have taken a good while to put togther but that wasn't counted.

As I understand it, the RAF had a policy pre-war that aircraft structure had to be as far as possible repairable by RAF groundcrew (with their existing skills) on the airfield. Hence the Hurricane (and the preceding Fury, Hart etc) had the fuselage frame made out of dozens of tubes rivetted and fishplated together and individual tubes could be relatively easily replaced. The Wellington's geodetics fall under the same heading - an enormous production problem but easily repairable.

Whereas the not much later Me 109 had a fuselage made out of about 6 big sheet alloy pressings with another 6 or so stringers inserted and rivetted. I believe that the 109 took half the manhours to build compared with a Spitfire - I've never seen a comparison with the Hurricane!
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