World's last Blackburn Beverley aircraft saved by plan to create amazing holiday let

Pilot Martyn Wiseman, who has an airfield near Selby, Birchwood Lodge, bought the giant aircraft at auction earlier this month. having had his eye on it for a year.

Mr Wiseman has already converted an eight-seater Hawker executive plane, which was once at the beck and call of the Russian jet set, into a luxury crash pad. It featured on George Clarke’s Channel 4 show Amazing Spaces.

But those plans are dwarfed by his vision for the transport plane, which will take six months to dismantle – the engines weigh two tonnes each – and then move by crane and lowloader from Paull Fort to his airfield.

There is even a possibility the parts could get flown the 33 miles distance if the RAF decides to get its heavy-lift Chinook helicopter fleet involved.

The conversion will see the area where the paratroopers once waited to jump turned into two bedrooms, while the main cargo hold – which could carry 94 troops – will be a kitchen and dining area.

And for the evening G&T where else? The cockpit where the pilot and co-pilots seats will be reupholstered and put on swivels, and guests can watch as aircraft land on Mr Wiseman’s runway.

Mr Wiseman said the day before the auction scrap dealers from London had pushed the price of the plane up to £18,000.

The final bill for the aircraft together with parts like tyres came to £34,000. Both he and philanthropist Georg Von der Muehll, a Swiss banker, have chipped in £28,000 each.

Both share a passion for “radial” aircraft – those with engines with cylinders which radiate outwards from the central crankcase like the spokes of a wheel – and neither could bear the prospect of seeing the aircraft chopped up for scrap.

Some people had hoped it would remain a museum, but Mr Wiseman said “simple commercial reality” had to prevail. Nothing would be thrown away, with some internal fittings going on display in a separate building.

Mr Wiseman, who has a civil engineering firm and also makes bespoke experimental designs for light aircraft, said: “You have to be realistic. As a museum it’s not an attraction – people will come once and that’s it.

"We don’t have the funds to restore this back to its original condition and maintain it for the next 50 years without it paying its own way. This will virtually guarantee it as long as I am around because it will be self-funding.

“This will be an absolute one off – there will be nothing else in the world like it.

“We will call the aircraft Georg as a thank you and have said we will teach him how to fly.”

He his plans for the plane secret, until a week before the auction. He said: “My wife wasn’t keen at all. I was chatting to Georg and he popped his share of the money through and then I had to confess to my wife – she took a bit of persuading.”

A crowdfunding appeal will be launched on Sunday to try and raise £100,000 to move and rebuild the plane.

Mr Wiseman said there would be a number of different levels, with those who donate the largest sums getting the chance to come to learn to fly radial aircraft at Birchwood Lodge –once part of RAF Riccall, which was a bomber base during WW2.

He said: “There are 444,000 rivets – if everybody would chip in £1 per rivet - we’d be done, finished.”

The plane will have to be cleaned to deal with corrosion.

The Beverley Association, for former aircrew and groundcrew, he said, were very supportive and “quite relaxed about getting it modernised to preserve it.”