As I recall the sad tale of the Meteor crashes, eventually one of the investigators noticed that the wing upper surface roundels were blurred as though double printed. It turned out that the double image was caused by the wings clapping together. Apparently there was a weakness in the rear fuselage which let it hinge upward, putting the fuselage nose-up and causing the wing spar to give way and the wings to fold. Lot of aircraft and pilots lost before this was diagnosed and remedied.

PS - The other henry crun (alas no longer with us) mentions "double mainplane failure" but the cause was then unknown.
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On Bargain Hunt today there was a boxed Dinky Gloster Javelin bought for £35 but only made £18,well below what it should have fetched.
Meteor RA490 was transferred to Aero Flight, RAE Bedford and on 27 April 1955 Flt/Lt Mitchell made the first of a number of jet-deflected landings there. I presume it was scrapped at Thurleigh late fifties can anybody confirm ?

Speaking of small miniature metal aircraft, I thought this was impressive scaling. Scanned from a 1964 National Geographic...

http://i62.tinypic.com/nd4ttt.jpg

A fellow aviation enthusiast and I used to cycle to Lasham or Blackbushe when we were allowed out of school at weekends. The photo of me standing on the wing of a Meteor IV was taken in 1952 or 1953. There used to be a Lancaster parked next to it, unfortunately the photos have been lost.
Little did I know that five or six years later I would be patrolling over Cyprus in a Meteor F8.

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c3...pse83e3fb1.jpg

I bought a very nice 1/100 scale 74 Sqn Meteor F8 diecast model by Amer Com on Amazon recently. I think it is also available on eBay - priced about £12.

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c3...ps59996d45.jpg

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c3...pse2575fea.jpg

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c3...psef26aa0f.jpg

A bit later than that in 1957, I was on a CCF cadet gliding course at RAF Halton, the Apprentices Training School. On a no-flying day, two of us spent a blissful hour or so clambering into a number of Meteors that were clearly "past it", with canopies left open on the grass outside the hangars. Possibly they were surplus to apprentice instructional requirements, and were just left to rot.

That was interesting enough, but along with them in this rather sad aircraft graveyard were several Mosquito night fighters with belly hatches left open, and similarly abandoned. We were up into these like rats up a drainpipe, and sitting in the pilot's seats it was easy to imagine that these very aircraft had seen active service, since this was only 12 years after the end of WW2.

BW - that looks very nice