"The remains of a Spitfire shot down while on a mission to photograph the WW2 German battleship Tirpitz have been recovered from a Norwegian peat bog. Auchterarder-born pilot, Flt Lt Alastair "Sandy" Gunn, had flown the aircraft out of RAF Wick in Caithness on 5 March 1942. Gunn was captured, interrogated, imprisoned and later executed after the Stalag Luft III "Great Escape". His plane, Spitfire AA810, is to be restored and flown again. Finding the aircraft, which crashed on a mountainside near the village of Surnadal, south west of Trondheim, has involved months of research and days of painstaking recovery work. Sussex-based Spitfire historian and restorer Tony Hoskins studied historical documents and drew on local knowledge in Surnadal to find the Spitfire. Parts of the aircraft had been found previously, but not the main crash site. Mr Hoskins made a search of the suspected location of the main site with some local people. They first came across "quite a large amount" of aircraft parts on the surface of the peat bog, before Mr Hoskins detected more below the surface with the aid of a metal detector. Mr Hoskins said: "It was an incredible high to find the Spitfire."" Scot's secret mission Spitfire found
*Bumped for an update*. Didn't realise this was five years ago. "A group of volunteers restoring a Spitfire pulled from a peat bog in Norway have appealed for help as they rebuild it to fly again. Spitfire AA810 was shot down in March 1942 during a mission to photograph German battleship Tirpitz. Pilot Flt Lt Alastair "Sandy" Gunn bailed out but was captured, imprisoned and later executed after the Stalag Luft III "Great Escape". It is being rebuilt on the Isle of Wight and is expected to fly in 2024. The plane, an unarmed Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) Spitfire, was found by engineer and founder of the Spitfire AA810 project Tony Hoskins after years of research in June 2018. He said: "This will be the earliest military unarmed reconnaissance aeroplane that will be airworthy. "The reason we think it's really special is it's the only aeroplane relating to anybody who was in the Great Escape to survive." The plane's remains arrived at Airframe Assemblies on the Isle of Wight in September 2019 after a small team of volunteers and local residents dug the warplane out of the peat bog by hand. Each piece had to be carried down the mountainside to the village of Surnadal in Norway... ...The project is currently looking for sponsors to raise the £1.25m remaining to finish the plane "to the point of it sitting there with a full tank of fuel ready to go and fly", Mr Hoskins said." www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-65309593
