It is my immense pleasure to welcome you to the first edition of The Vintage Aviation Echo. It was only six months ago that we decided to leave digital publishing behind and move permanently to print – the medium we truly believe the Echo was always meant for. The eleven articles published within these pages were carefully curated to capture the spirit of aviation, giving a voice to the aviators who fly some of the world’s rarest and most challenging aeroplanes, and the people whose tireless efforts return them to flight.

 

Entwining both is our telling of the monumental 30-year rebuild of Messerschmitt Bf 109 E WerkNummer 1983, an aircraft that utterly enthralled aficionados when it broke cover in summer 2023. Eberhard Thiesen, the 109 E’s sympathetic owner, rallied through a great many challenges during the rebuild; his demand for originality and quality craftsmanship are reflected in the finished aeroplane. Thiesen contracted the airframe rebuild to Craig Charleston, the world’s foremost Bf 109 E specialist with decades of ‘Emil’ engineering experience behind him. And then, when the 109 E’s engine catastrophically failed at the eleventh hour, the meticulous technical sensitivities of Dirk Bende and his team at Bonn-Hangelar breathed life into the aeroplane with an immaculately overhauled Daimler-Benz 601N engine that has powered it aloft practically without fault for 15 flights thus far.

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Thiesen, Charleston and Bende – three private, elusive and self-effacing individuals whose combined resources, skills and experience shaped Wk Nr 1983’s rebuild. All offer their insight within these pages. They found in Charlie Brown a supremely experienced, highly regarded test pilot with 109 E experience dating back almost 25 years. A quiet operator, certainly, but one with an abundance of personality that shines through in the final chapter of this story’s telling.

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“I must stress,” Charleston told me when we spoke for the first time, “that a great many people contributed towards making this aircraft what it is.” We’ve gone to great lengths to do this exceptional machine, and the people who made her so, justice. It’s a fitting marquee article for the Echo: Volume I, tying personal perspectives with technical insight.

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We couldn’t have realised our ambitions of taking the Echo to print if not for the investment of the advertisers and retailers who bought into our concept. Moreover, I’d like to extend my sincere gratitude to the 300 people from 15 countries who put their faith in us and pre-ordered their copy on the strength of an idea, without whom this journal would have remained a fleeting thought.

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Elliott Marsh – Editor & Co-creator