Meet Australia's oldest existing aircraft, the Deperdussin! 🛩️
In this special behind-the-scenes video, join Kim Wood (Large Technology Object (LTO) Conservator) as he takes us through this historic aircraft from the Memorial's National Collection.
Uh my name is Woody, I'm part of the LTO conservation team. This is a Deperdussin, about 1912 it was built. A monoplane, it was a little trainer used for taxing, taxi training and things like that.
A really interesting thing about this, is if you consider we're talking 10 years from when the Wright brothers flew to when the Australian Army was starting to introduce aircraft into the scheme,.
This was the first contrivance that they came up with, they were learning what the concept of flight was, they were basically coming off horses and an environment where nobody had any idea whatsoever - what flying really was and this is where they started. They got put into one of these things and taxied it around and took little leaps and little flights and things like that and started to get a feel for this new contrivance called an aeroplane. It's the oldest Australian military aircraft in existence.
So this was the first time in several decades that the aeroplane has been assembled, ever since I've - I started at the War Memorial which was nearly 15 years ago, I've seen it there in the corner and I thought to myself, how cool is this little piece of gear. It was just, it's a part of our Australian history, it's part of military history.
I'm a ex-Australian serviceman and to see those old bits and pieces, the relics of our - our history uh and get up close to it, it's it's quite an honor, I mean I've worked on an amazing variety of aeroplanes, but this is the oldest aeroplane I've ever worked on.
