Rare warplane that survived Pearl Harbor attack returning to US
A New York-built American fighter that's one of the few remaining
still-airworthy planes to survive the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is
being donated to a Massachusetts-based organization that flies World
War II aircraft at living history events across the nation.
Robert
Collings, executive director of the Stow, Massachusetts-based Collings
Foundation, said that the purchase of the Curtiss P-40B Warhawk from an
aviation museum in England was completed this week. The plane will be
disassembled and shipped to the United States, where it eventually will
fly over Buffalo and other cities, with plans to participate in the 75th
anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack in 2016, he said.
"The
history that comes with it is pretty special," Collings said Friday, the
day before the 72nd anniversary of the surprise attack in Hawaii that
launched the U.S. into the Second World War. "It was obvious that we
needed to get this airplane back to America."
Collings said a
sponsor who wishes to remain anonymous bought the plane for several
million dollars from The Fighter Collection in Duxford, England. He said
the person who bought the warplane will donate the aircraft to the
Collings Foundation, bringing its collection of World War II aircraft to
a dozen, including a B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator, both
bombers.
The Warhawk heading back to the U.S. came off the
assembly line at the Curtiss Aircraft Co. plant in Buffalo in early
1941. Later that year, it was undergoing repairs in a hangar at Wheeler
Field on Oahu when waves of Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor on
the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. While more than 300 other U.S. planes were
destroyed or damaged during the attack, the P-40B escaped unscathed.
But
seven weeks after the attack, the plane crashed into a mountain on
Oahu, killing the pilot. His body was recovered but the wreckage was
left at the remote crash site. In the 1980s, a California warplane
restoration group recovered the wreck and began working on the P-40B,
rebuilding it with parts salvaged from two similar aircraft. The plane
was flying again by 2004, soon after being acquired by The Fighter
Collection.
Collings said the plane was purchased from the
English museum for "several million dollars" but wouldn't divulge the
sale price or who the sponsor is. He said only a handful of P-40Bs
exist, including one owned by Microsoft founder Paul Allen. Curtiss
produced nearly 14,000 P-40s at its Buffalo plant from 1939-44. It was a
workhorse for American and Allied air forces early in the war, and it
was the same plane flown by the famed Flying Tigers, the name given to
the American squadron that fought for China against Japan before
American entered the war.
The only other Pearl Harbor survivor
still flying is a Grumman J2F-4 Duck, a privately owned, float-equipped
biplane based in Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to vintage warplane
experts. The few other surviving aircraft, such as the Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum's Sikorsky JRS-1 amphibious search plane,
are no longer airworthy.
"It's pretty important in terms of the
rarity of that particular airplane," Jeremy Kinney, a Smithsonian
aviation curator, said of the foundation's P-40B and its Pearl Harbor
connection. "We don't even have one."
