Warbirds Still Flying

With the end of World War II, there were many military aircraft available to almost anyone that wanted to buy one for a few hundred dollars. Most of these went to scrap dealers that melted them down for their aluminum value, but some were saved by pilots that could not afford anything else to fly. The few that were rescued from the scrap dealers were the lucky airplanes that recently have proven to be most valuable.

Such well known fighters as the P-51 Mustang or the gull winged Corsair are today each worth almost a million dollars in restored and flyable condition. Curtiss P-40's or British Spitfires all sell for well over a million dollars rebuilt. Bombers such as the four engine B-17 are easily valued at more than a couple million dollars.

The most valuable aircraft are from those countries that lost the war. Authentic German Messerschmidt 109 fighters must be worth at least five million, but unfortunately there are none flying. The only examples are the few in museums that are too valuable to ever take to the air. The Japanese Zero used throughout the Pacific is almost as rare. We can only imagine what a real German jet fighter introduced near the end of the war would sell for today. An aircraft company in Fort Worth is building a handful of such as replicas at a million dollars a copy.

Strange as it might seem, many of these rare and unusual aircraft can still be found for free abandoned in remote parts of the world. Most people have no idea as to the possible value of such airplanes. However, even more important than their monetary worth is their historic value. Often they might be the sole remaining example of such an airplane. Almost any aircraft wreck, no matter how badly damaged, can be rebuilt back to a static museum display that looks as new as the day when it left the factory.

Unfortunately, to restore such a pile of wreckage into an airworthy and flyable airplane is much more difficult and many times more expensive than just a stationary display.

Imagine taking your family car and dropping it from a thousand feet, similar to a high speed plane crashing into the earth Now strip away half of the crashed pieces of that crushed car, just like local villagers scavenge abandoned airplanes for scrap metal. Leave what is left of the car out in the weather for over fifty years to rust and deteriorate. Now, make the remaining debris look like a showroom new car without buying any replacement parts. Need a steering wheel? Make one yourself out of a hunk of metal. It is not difficult to soon have more money invested in a restoration than the finished aircraft is worth.

Such a reconstruction becomes extremely expensive and usually is not practical unless it is an extremely rare type of airplane. Most often it is easier and less costly to search out another flying example of the same aircraft and just buy that. One shortcut is to find additional wreck sites of the same type and recover the parts needed to complete one airplane. It might require a dozen or more assorted crashed planes of the same model to find most of the parts needed to rebuild that one flyable example.

The location of such crash sites becomes quite important to any museum trying to rebuild an airplane. It is even more important to any group trying to rebuild an airplane to a flyable condition. The many small pieces, forging, castings, and fittings scattered around a crash are invaluable to the restorer. At one site, the tail and left wing might have survived with minimum damage. At another location the right wing could be slightly damaged, while still at another place is a plane with a good cockpit section. The best crashes are those where the pilot survived in the airplane. That means there was a limited amount of damage and therefore more useable parts.