JW Mecom Oil Company:
So, having opened up this particular can of worms, here are some photographs taken at Sharjah in 1970 when Mecom decided to move out of Oman. I think they were looking for oil in the Wadi Mugshin area to the north and east of Salalah with not a huge amount of luck.
The idea was to fly the aircraft back to Texas but it didn't quite work out that way. The Lodestar didn't even make it past Sharjah and it ended up in a local scrapyard.
The B-23 and the C-82 made it as far as Athens before the crews lost their sense of humour. They (the aircraft) were moved to a local technical college after a couple of years but have both been scrapped as far as I am aware.
The C-46 Commando was the only one that made it back to the USA.
Incidentally, I had half a dozen good shots of the B-23 Dragon N86E. I loaned them to a fellow Air-Britain enthusiast who wrote an article about the B-23 and he used a couple of my photographs in his article. I am quite sure that he sent them all back to me and I put them "somewhere safe".
That is the problem with getting old; the "somewhere safe" depositorys are becoming more and more difficult to find!
