Aeroncas
Quiet skies and old aeroplanes… Arthur W J G Ord-Hume tells his remarkable 70-year-old story of Aeroncas
f you had popped into Somerton on the Isle of Wight in those heady days immediately after the end WWII, you would have found a typical aerodrome facing an uncertain future, as its wartime usefulness was no more. Visiting aircraft were few and far between, occasionally parked on the grass was the odd RAF Tiger Moth, which had braved the Solent crossing from Eastleigh. American Piper Cubs, all with Yankee ‘NC’ registrations followed by a host of numerals, sometimes made social visits, no doubt to cement wartime relations with locals before being repatriated to the ‘land of the hamburger’. Seagulls soared uninterrupted through skies unsullied by the unexpected arrival of occasional RAF machines which had once used the field in an emergency in time of conflict. Owners Saunders-Roe had flown countless Walrus amphibians from the turf once used by Spartan Airlines with their triple-engined Cruisers. Wartime visitors had included a Dakota and a disorientated German pilot in a Messerschmitt Bf.109! Yes, Somerton was a peaceful oasis on the rising ground to the west of bustling Cowes where, in pre-war days, yachts had assembled and raced for
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Main Paul Simpson poses with G-AEVT, a British-built Aeronca 100, in his back garden at Pinner Hill in 1948. The original wings were beyond repair, so they were replaced by those from G-AEVE, the so-called Aeronca Ely. This was the aircraft he crashed as a result of wind shear.
kudos and trophies. War took its toll though, and yachts were now almost the nautical version of hen’s teeth, especially at Cowes, which was only just getting used to having restarted a regular ferry crossing to the mainland. Anyway, if you had been at Somerton in 1947 you would have found a few interesting relics abandoned in the hangars. Besides some identifiable bits of Walrus, there were several obscure airframes, stripped of everything useful, which were heaped in one of them. One was never quite certain whether they were recent, survivors of better times, or simply things nobody wanted any more. Over at Gatwick Racecourse, for instance, loads of abandoned pre-war aircraft, many stored six and more years in the open, were being piled up and burned as plans were made to expand the small grass airfield which served the racegoers. But sharp-eyed observers in those far-off days at Somerton would have had no difficulty recognising a large and semi-circular rudder as being that of an American-built Aeronca C.3. The rest of the aircraft, lying about the earthen floor of the hangar, was not so
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