[Larry]

After ET574 was located, the RAF Museum showed interest in returning ET574 to the UK and displaying it ‘as found’. However, like most things, it wasn’t always that straight forward and even worse, it involved the giving away of a Supermarine Spitfire to Egypt.

As reported in The Telegraph in 2015: A valuable Spitfire has been lost to the nation after an “ill-conceived” deal by the RAF Museum to exchange it for the recovery of another aircraft that it is unlikely to ever receive, it has been revealed. Museum bosses “paid” a salvage team an original Spitfire from their collection to retrieve a WW2 RAF Kittyhawk P-40 plane that was found intact (sic) in the Sahara Desert 70 years after it crashed. But three years on and the museum, of which Prince Phillip was a patron, has conceded they may have lost the Spitfire with nothing to show for it after the political unrest in Egypt stalled negotiations to bring the Kittyhawk back to Britain. They tasked a private salvage company with going to Egypt and saving the plane from souvenir hunters in the summer of 2012.

The RAF Museum handed over the Spitfire, one of 110 (at the time) remaining in Britain and that had been donated by the Ministry of Defence in 1998, and then to Kennet Aviation as payment for the operation. A team from Essex-based Kennet were given permission to salvage the Kittyhawk aircraft and secure it in a shipping container which was then taken to a site at El Alamein (to be loaded for shipment)

Since then, nothing, so is the Spitfire’s now? What was its serial number?

I appreciate the country was gripped by political turmoil at the time and the Kittyhawk was not high on the Egyptian government’s agenda. Even though it was restored and retained in Egypt, so where is our Spitfire?