[TomcatViP]

BoB museum or the Shuttleworth collection had one I think some years ago in flight condition.

I don't think that CAM ship needed any boosted or special aircraft to be proteced.

Remember that they needed to down reconnaissance Condor that were monitoring the convoy.

I have in memory the story of Hurri being converted from coastal command (and those were not new Hurri) and then moved on teh CAM ship mission.

Also there was only a handful of pilots qualified for that particular exercise (something like 22 - not sure). I read the story of one that did 3 mission (bailing out two time in teh sea and being knocked down once while running to his plane during an alert).

Can't remember the title but as I think he was an ex wingman of Bader, probably the story might be somewhere in Bader story.

Anyway, giving the weary airframe and the dangerous mission with flight in bad weather (when the U-boat were attacking with the Condor coordinating or recognizing the target for the wolf pack) it's un-likely that they played with some tricky eng mods just to gain 20 sec in a climb to cloud base as was alrdy pointed out.

3000ft/min is a huge climb rate. The 109 managed to maintain that one during the war despite her overweight and still was considered one of the best climber at the end.

I am sry to be so contradictory.

Nice to see you back Vip !