Posted on 04/27/2007 9:17:04 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
A builder is celebrating after snapping up a model plane with a difference.
Neil Banwell, 39, bought a full-size Sea Harrier Jump Jet on the internet auction site eBay for just £10,000.
Father-of-three Mr Banwell from Wedmore, Somerset, has now given the 26-year-old fighter plane pride of place in his back garden.
The Harrier Jump Jet XZ494, which would have cost around £35 million new, is believed to have seen action in the Falklands War, 25 years ago.
Mr Banwell saw the plane, which has no engine, up for auction on eBay and decided to enter a bid.
He said he was amazed when his bid was accepted and he realised he was to become the new owner of a 45ft fighter bomber.
He said: "There are lots of parts missing but I'm doing it up.
"It was such a surprise to discover the plane on eBay in the first place and it got even better when I found out I'd been successful with the bid.
"It was a bit of a shock when it was delivered as they are quite big."
Mr Banwell will now study records to find out more details about the history of his plane.
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He is now armed nearly as well as th UK.
If that ain’t the mother of all lawn ornaments . . .
Man that is a beauty!
I wonder if his wife is pleased? “snicker”
From the way the article is written, it sounds almost like an offhand, spur of the moment purchase by an inexperienced buyer.
Good for him though; he’s keeping a bit of British history alive and making a magnificent pro-military statement.
And now he knows....yes, when you enter a bid at eBay it really does mean that you’re entering into a buyer’s contract and when you win, you really will get the item :-)
All sorts of fun stuff comes up for sale there....I recall a WW2 vintage aircraft carrier up for sale once as well as lots of other big, fun military stuff. All you need is money and a place to put it :-)
And here's a military landing craft in case you need to invade Iran ahead of the troops :-)
The Sun Online - News Have a look war I got on eBay
Jump jet ... Sea Harrier, top left, engine chamber, bottom left, and Neil Banwell with his proud purchase, right
Very cool, but he needs to lose the blue tape around it, and have it properly guarded by a phalanx of garden gnomes.
Gnome phalanxes are good, flamingo strikes are not.
That would be the *mother* of all treeforts!
Or, install a small HD screen, cable feed, refrigerator, sound system, and more padding for the seat, and it’d be a hell of a den!
He could probably make his money back lending it out to movie companies too.
Talk about a dumb waste of money.
I guess if I had the $$ to toss around, I would go for a later version of the Mig-21’s that are/were out on the market. I read up a lot on the development history of the airplane, and it was designed so a 19 year old could fly one fairly quickly.
No that does not mean he was trained enough to survive his first 5 dogfights.
His HOA is going to have a coronary...
I want one (with the U.S. Marine Corps paint job). WAY to GO GUY! Semper Fi...
Yard art ping
Reminds of one of my previous lives. Remember about 10 to years ago when Pepsi ran thier Pepsi points promo. If you collected like 7,000,000 points you could get a Harrier Jet!!!
Well at the time I was running a small plastic recycling company where we reground milk jugs, pop bottles and the such to be used as feedstock in making moe plastic stuff. Well we started noticing a lot of Pepsi points going by on the conveyor so we started collecting the bottles hoping to get enough points so that we could get the Harrier:-)
Sadly we were not succesfull, bummer, but we did collect about 3 to 4,000 points apiece between the 4 of us that worked there. We had all sorts of cool things show up
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
And I thought a swing set was a pain to mow around.
There was some M60 tank searchlight/targeting spotlights on Ebay last year I was bidding on, I know of some people that have bought them, they are like a smaller compact version of Klieg lights used at special events.
That picture isn’t the airframe that was sold on ebay. What the buyer got was was simply a shell of an airframe.
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