(All images by Alan Allen, reproduced with permission)
A healthy number of Blackburn Buccaneer subsonic strike jets survive in aviation museums today. But after the type was retired from Royal Air Force service in March 1994, the majority were broken up for scrap. These photos show a line of Buccaneers in the process of recycling at RAF Shawbury in Shropshire once their flying days were over.
Introduced operationally in 1962, the Blackburn Buccaneer initially served with the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm and the South African Air Force, as well as the RAF. But like all military aircraft, retirement brought mass scrapping after a job well done.
Above, a line of redundant jets, stripped of all useful parts, awaits recycling at RAF Shawbury, a former Royal Flying Corps airfield dating back to World War One that now serves, among other duties, as a storage facility for grounded aircraft.
Meanwhile, Buccaneer XX896, daubed with the dreaded ‘blue cross of death’, stands amid a pile of torn metal and wires before being ripped apart.
Flipped on its back, a mechanical digger tears into the battered fuselage of one old airframe.
Barely recognisable as a former warplane, only the undercarriage betrays the original purpose of this tangled pile of scrap metal.
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