Our horizontal stabiliser leading edge feature pieces have a remarkable story behind them - and it's not just the hundeds of thousands of hours of stabilising lift they generated for EBU, but how they came to be in our posession.
The horizontal stabiliser is a smaller wing at the rear of the aircraft, which provides a stabilising force to the fuselage of the airframe in pitch. The horizontal stabiliser has an elevator attached to the rear of it on a hinge, and this piece moves up and down to change the attitude of the aeroplane.
Pieces like these are not often able to be recovered becuase they are either simply too large (like the main wing) or they are in hard-to-reach, high places (like the horizontal stabiliser). And so, when EBU's final dismantling amounted in a large pile of rubble, we carefully sifted through what we could to see if anything further was able to be saved. We stumbled upon a generally intact piece of the tailplane and decided to try and recover it.
A large amount of love and care was required to turn this into something amazing, and we believe we achieved just that. It's impressive to look at even these small sections of horizontal stabiliser, and think about the air particles that have passed around that piece of aluminimum and the amount of lift that has been generated over many thousands of miles flown.
These are extremely unique items for any aviation collect, given their usual hard-to-come-by nature, let alone the fact that when finished and polished, they look simply stunning.
View our horizontal stabiliser collection here.
