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Re: Fire in the hole!

Posted by Rob Mears on Tue Jun 18, 2002 07:39:54 PM

In reply top Fire in the hole! posted by Scott WRG Editor on Tue Jun 18, 2002 06:22:30 PM

With the Corsairs, I judge the identity of the aircraft from the plane's center (cockpit) section. Alot of people consider the cockpit area the point of reference on most planes since it usually contains the aircraft's primary data plate.

The Corsair has a factory break just behind the cockpit, and the folding wing panels can be removed as well. That makes for four major fuselage sections, not counting the firewall forward components. Each of these four major components has a data plate identifying the original aircraft that they came from.

Next time you're at an airshow and there's a Corsair with its wings folded, search inside the wing fold for the small data plate. I've yet to find a Corsair with wing panels that are a factory original match to the fuselage :) It apparently was a fairly common practice during the plane's service lives to have these swapped out as a result of damage, overhaul, etc. Because of this, I basically rule out wing panels as the point of reference when judging the plane's "originality" or identity.

That leaves us with the center and aft fuselage sections. Believe it or not, even though these two components are relatively easy to remove and swap between planes, I'd say 90+% of the survivors are still paired with their original aft fuselage sections. In the case of a mix-matched pair (Bob Odeggard's F4U-4 for example) I'll index the plane using the center section identity, but the actual recorded history for the plane takes on a mulitple personality which includes the alternate history for the aft fuselage as well. IMO it's better to complicate a recorded history with a representative time line for each of these major components than to forsake everything else just to focus on the section that holds the primary data plate.

Until recently it's been fairly easy to keep up with Corsairs because the main spar is such a complicated piece to replicate. If you had a main spar, you were guaranteed to have a usable center section (the spars are stamped with the factory construction number). If you had no main spar then you had a nice pile of spare parts ;)

Now however, we have guys like Tom Reiley who have become brave enough to try (and succeed) at creating new build main spars. With this, I think we are finally getting to a point where we have what some would consider "replica" F4U's. The Jim Frye plane that was until recently at Tom's place in Kissimmee is for the most part a brand new, scratch built plane. It's been paired with an F3A-1 Brewster Corsair wing, and another wing recovered from Honduras. The project was based on a severely damaged fuselage recovered from the Sierra Nevada mountain range, but the Bureau Number issued by the Navy for the recovered remains was for an FG-1D (the remains recovered were from an F4U-4). That effectively leaves us with no real identity to draw on except from the wings, which for reasons pointed out earlier do not offer a realistic basis for an "identity".

Because of this, Jim Frye's plane will be the first Corsair to claim the identity of what I like to consider a "custom-built" F4U. Ironically, it will probably be the finest, straightest Corsair in existence, with a true 0-time airframe at that! The workmanship on this thing is amazing. I'll admit, had the Navy issued the proper BuNo. for the plane I would probably be tempted to index this Corsair using that number, regardless of the fact that only a small part of the fuselage is actually from said aircraft. The 'control' for that decision would be to firstly and foremostly outline the facts surrounding the restoration so that a pilot from Korea with that BuNo. in his log books didn't mistake the beautiful bird on the flight line for the one he logged twenty-odd hours in during combat ;)

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