Last surviving German bomber could take years to preserve It will be sprayed every ten minutes out of every 30 with a citric acid based solution, to clean the aircraft and prevent any further corrosion. It will then be transferred to the conservation centre, but it could be about five years before it's on permanent display. The plane had to be kept moist for the journey from Ramsgate to Cosford to prevent it corroding further when it comes into contact with oxygen, and this will be continued in the hydration tunnels. It was one of the so called "flying pencils," nicknamed because of their narrow fuselage - none of which were thought to have survived the Second World War. The plane was finally recovered after a series of attempts, hampered by the weather, to rescue it from the seabed and was winched from the sea covered in rust and barnacles on Monday evening. Commercial diving company Seatech worked with the RAF Museum salvage team to recover the plane, and ten divers were involved with attaching lifting equipment to it. A window of good weather allowed them to retrieve the Dornier Do 17 bomber. John Harper, contracts manager at Seatech, said: "Usually when we try to bring an aircraft off the seabed we put strops round it, and generally what happens is it falls to pieces. We thought as this happened in past experience we would use a frame to try and lift it, but in the end we couldn't do that because of the weather. Seatech had been working to recover the plane for the last 16 days, but had been hampered by the weather, and were able to recover it at about 6.30pm on Monday, when it was pulled to a barge. Mr Harper added: "Parts of both of the engines fell off and a part of one of the wings. Divers had to go down afterwards and recover these. Mr Harper said there will be one final dive to search for anything else that had been left behind. The aircraft at Goodwin Sands, off the Kent coast, was discovered by divers in 2008, and scans by the RAF Museum, Wessex Archaeology and the Port of London Authority confirmed it was a Dornier Do 17Z Werke number 1160.