This photo tells a little bit about why some warbirds are so rare. We have all seen the images of post-WWII boneyards in Arizona, Alabama, and New Mexico, but many veteran combat aircraft didn't even make it that far after the fighting. This scene shows a Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber in Germany, being dynamited into "bite-sized" pieces for the scrapper's smelter. You see, the military made choices about what to keep and what to dispose of. B-26s or B-25s? Keep the 25s.

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Part of what gives the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt much of its "Jug-like" shape is the fighter's maze of tubes and pipes running through its belly—from the big R-2800 engine to the turbo supercharger and back. The design had one unintended consequence that made pilots and mechanics love the Jug even more. The hollow pipes created what amounted to a "crumple zone" in the lower regions of the plane. Devoid of critical components, a bellied P-47 could be rebuilt relatively quickly...

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It's that nagging question that you have always been afraid to ask: Did the F-84 start life as simply a jet-powered P-47?

Well, sort of. When the Army Air Force asked for a new jet design in 1944, Republic toyed with what it would take to throw a fiery fan into a Thunderbolt airframe. Several design studies over the summer and fall proved it was going to be a tough transition. An amazing artwork by Damian Manley shows the possible results.

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Last week the Flying Heritage Collection changed the tracks on its M4A1 Sherman tank. It was a relatively simple process; akin to putting socks on an angry elephant. With that being said, we had many great advantages that would have made a frontline G.I. nothing but overjoyed.

First of all, the tank wasn't skewed sideways into a ditch and mired in three feet of mud. Typically, a tank doesn't throw a track anywhere nearly this hospitable. The...

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This week, the FHC staff is removing the turret from the M4A1 Sherman tank.

In order to restore the interior to its wartime condition, a few extras need to be installed. Unfortunately, some of these items are too big to slip down into the tank through the small hatches. But we refuse to blow our tops over such a challenge. The FHC employed a crane to pluck the 5-ton turret from the top of the tank and set it gently to the side. Now, we have...

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The WWII-era P-51 Mustang is a marvel of design. The plane’s efficient wing allowed it to fly great distances. One addition to the wing design, not seen in the earliest models, is a set of diaphragms adjoining the fighter’s dynamically and statically balanced ailerons. These lengths of fabric and aluminum are affixed to the rear spar at their leading edge, hugging each side of the aileron (which removed in this photo). They fill in the cavity between the wing and the...

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The little compartments on the bottom of the P-40’s wings have always confounded us. The little alcoves are 27 inches long and about 5 inches deep and have a door across the bottom. It led us to joke that it’d be an excellent place for a pilot to cool a couple of bottles a beer during a long flight. And hey, stuck on some hot Pacific island with a shooting war going on, who could blame him? The real answer is a bit more reasonable. Flares. Early P-40 aircraft were...

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The Polikarpov I-16 is a solid little machine. You only have to be involved in pushing it around to know that it feels like it's made of bricks. When outnumbered and out of ammunition, Soviet pilots on the Eastern Front resorted to ramming German bombers. In the least dangerous method (still more than scary), a Soviet pilot would hit an enemy plane with a part of his own, bumping it with his wing for example. Other pilots chose to use their propeller to saw into the control surfaces...

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When conducting weight and balance calculations on an airplane, you want the machine to rest at flight attitude. On a tail-dragger, the aircraft can be 10 degrees or more nose-up when it is sitting on the ground. When the angle shifts, so does the weight distribution of the plane’s components. To get the plane oriented correctly, a mechanic uses leveling lugs—a pair of small brackets carefully riveted into the interior of the plane. Run a rigid piece of wood or metal...

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The Focke-Wulf Fw 190's canopy rails are not parallel. They taper inward as they extend toward the tail. As the canopy slides backwards on these rails, Focke-Wulf designers came up with a solution to make sure the brittle acrylic glass doesn't crack. A hinge at the top front edge of the canopy relieves the pressure, actually making the canopy slightly taller and narrower when it is in the open position than when it is closed. The bowing canopy is an ingenious engineering feat, but it's...

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The Hellcat is days away from flying for the first time in decades. A test pilot is expected next week. (Let's hope for good weather.) Before the rare fighter gets back into the air, FHC staffers are taking care of a long list of loose ends. One item on the list is weight and balance information for the plane. To get the data, we need to install the Hellcat's battery of weighty .50-caliber guns — three per wing. Each hefty Browning M2 weighs about 83 pounds.

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By 1945, there were gaggles of Navy carrier planes seemingly everywhere in the skies over the Pacific. To keep track of who was who, the Navy ordered distinctive and bold white symbols painted on the aircraft so flyers could tell, for example, Hellcats from the USS Franklin (a single white diamond) from the USS Hornet (white checkers). Mostly straight lines, (curves and circles took too long to lay out), the geometric shapes—chevrons, triangles, squares, and...

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When your Honda needs a tune-up, what do you do? There are a million Hondas out there and, therefore, thousands of mechanics who can handle the job. When your rare Daimler-Benz DB.601Aa engine needs a check-up, things become a bit more complicated. I think it's safe to say a Honda (or Mercedes) mechanic won't do.

Mike Nixon not only knows this engine, he built it. Mike is the owner of Vintage V-12s. He brings exotic piston engines back to life and...

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The FHC’s Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat goes into the paint shop on Valentine’s Day. The Glossy Sea Blue fighter will get its complement of Insignia White markings over the top — national insignia, numerous warning data plaques, and, of course, squadron insignia. The scheme was chosen to honor a local ace. Lt. Reuben H. Denoff flew in the invasion of North Africa, fought with VF-9 in the Pacific, and then joined VF-12 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. The Hellcat,...

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When you are hunting big game, you need a big gun. The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet carried two Mk 108 autocannons. Each weapon fired 650 rounds a minute and each explosive round was over one inch in diameter. That's a lot of punching power. The American .50-caliber aircraft gun seen next to the Mk 108 in the photo is decidedly smaller and lighter. Making a quick and brutal attack was the only way for a Komet to succeed. Rocketing along (literally) at over 500...

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The tower at Paine Field got a strange call today. How often does the driver of an M4A1 Sherman tank seek permission to cruise the taxiways and cross a runway?

FHC staffers were bringing back the tank from the paint shop. The newly-restored machine spent a few days parked at SunQuest Air Specialties, Inc. getting its markings. The Sherman will be "Boomerang," a member of the 7th Armored Division, 31st Battalion — a tank lost in September of...

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Flying Heritage Collection staffers rolled the B-25J Mitchell outside on a foggy morning to take some fuel out of its tanks. While out of the hangar, mechanics took advantage of the open space and dreary weather to harmonize the bomber's .50 caliber guns. Sitting in the cockpit and looking through the gunsight, they affixed an X made out of tape to the side of the hangar as an aim point. Then, one by one, the guns were adjusted to hit this target. The FHC had an advantage that the...

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The FHC's B-25J is from block 25. Some 1,000 of them were built at the Fairfax Bomber Plant in Kansas City. One of the improvements to the block 25 airplanes was a new type of pilot's seats. The flyers sat in what was, basically, an armored box with 3/8-inch “24-ST Dural burst plates” to the sides and front.

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While the size of the average man stayed about the same, the size of the average fighter plane, and its cockpit, increased during World War II. This image shows the spacious working space in the Flying Heritage Collection's P-47 Thunderbolt.

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The interior components of a plane like the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt glow with greenish yellow panels and plates. The strange stuff is zinc chromate -- a semi-translucent covering used for corrosion control. Model builders have always had trouble accurately replicating zinc chromate because its exact shade didn't much matter to airplane builders during the war. As long as the protective coating was slathered all over...

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Both of our Japanese fighter aircraft wear a yellow band along the leading edge of their wings. After late 1941, most Japanese combat aircraft have these markings. In Donald Thorpe’s famous book "Japanese Army Air Force Camouflage and Markings, World War II," he describes them as “identification panels” for “recognition” but has very little to say about the details. I have heard many scenarios over the years. Imagine one Oscar zooming head-on at another. All of...

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If you have visited the Flying Heritage Collection, you had to wonder about that odd name painted on the nose of the P-51 Mustang. Upupa epops is the scientific name for the Hoopoe Bird. It's a very inside joke conceived by the plane's pilot, Harrison “Bud” Tordoff. You see, before becoming an ace pilot during WWII, Tordoff was an ornithology (study of birds) student at Cornell University. That funny name of the Hoopoe Bird stuck in his head. Better yet, Upupa epops is a...

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The Flying Heritage Collection's Hellcat is currently up on jack stands, awaiting a landing gear test. Great care is taken to assure that the plane does not slip from its stands and come down. But that wouldn't hurt the plane one bit. Made to land on the pitching deck of a carrier, the Hellcat's gear and airframe can take a brutal beating.

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The Flying Heritage Collection's Hurricane carries an image of a bulldog, wearing pilot's helmet and boxing gloves, duking it out with the viewer as the opponent-the symbol of the Royal Canadian Air Force's No. 135 Squadron. Perhaps it was a natural that the unit would pick the bulldog. The beast was "tenacious, dogged, and sturdy, like a Hurricane fighter plane." Some of the veteran members had just come back from overseas, fighting with the RAF in the Battle of Britain. There, British...

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