With the recent changes in EU legislation with regards to insuring vintage aircraft, I was thinking that there might be an easy way around it - rather than refurbishing and "fixing" existing aircraft....why not just dig out the original building plans and build a couple from scratch? That way they are new, don't need expensive maintenance, and think of the advantages too (higher quality wood, stainless steel, etc.)

Ex-RoNiN waits for billions of reasons why this can't work

Whilst this has helped me understand the directive a bit better, I'm still none the wiser about why we can't build some new "old" planes? Wouldn't it be cool to build a few new Mosquitos/Lightnings/B-17s/etc every few years to make sure they keep flying, rather than relying on the real planes from the war?

Part of the attraction has always been in seeing the original aircraft flying. In the same way, owning or even seeing a replica motor vehicle would not be as satisfying as seeing a beautifully restored original example.

New warbirds are being built, like the Me 262 project with modern engines that recently flew in the US. Beautiful they look too. Before his facility was destroyed by the recent hurricanes I saw enough brand new fuselage sections stored in Tom Reilly's warbird restoration hangar in Florida to build several brand spanking new B-17s. Then there's the WWI replicas like the Sopwith Triplane in the Specific Aircraft forum.* So accurate it's regarded as a late production model.

The late lamented Charles Church once told me if I could find him a genuine manufacturer's nameplate for a WWII Spitfire he could build me a Spitfire to rivet it onto. This would be regarded as an authentic WWII vintage Spitfire.

*PS. http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=types;action=display;num=1...

Did you know you can get your Yak-11 (big radial engine trainer) converted into a Yak-3...

Apart from ONE example (that uses the original engine and has working guns) any flying Yak-3 originally was a Yak-11, as the cannon cannot be removed from the engine.

Personally I'm happy with any restoration that starts with any substantial remains of an aircraft - lets face it, if it had been flying for the previous 60 years much would have been replaced at some stage anyway during servicing and maintenance.

On Ivan's point, we've been fortunate to see Yak-11/3 conversions in the UK already (although we've only seen the French based on fly over here), one of which is owned by OFMC and has just re flown after "restoration" in NZ (it had arrived from Russia after its conversion in the mid 90s, but from the amount of work that had to be done after it had arrived I don't think it was up to UK airworthiness standards on initial delivery). I'm sure TFC had one in the pipeline too...