XW198 after it did a jig on the end of the lazy runway and beat itself to death.....It was bound to happen as Airfix produced the model of it..
Wrong! Here is a picture to prove it.
Airfix came round to 33 Sqn to all the research on XW214 and then one day in March 1973 I had a call to say the model was ready and could we fly some of the kits in the actual aircraft. Unfortunately 214 had had a somewhat noisy discussion with a Belfast hangar door frame in Aldergrove followed but a bit of pique where it laid on its side and wound around 100 metres of gannet wire around its rotor head. Being a metal bladed Puma it had also worked over a few civilian cars parked nearbye.
Luckily Auntie Betty had some spare Pumas tucked away so we had been issued with XW227 which had in no time sported the letters C L on its boom. At the end of the day I took 227 to Battersea on the 28/3/1973. We had an excellent lunch on Airfix and then they took lots of photos of the aircraft showing the C L but not the XW227. The scan above is of an unbuilt kit from that flight.
There were later kits with those ghastly poliwhatsits on the engines but at the time that XW198 threw a wobbly that was the only kit going.