Warplane Restorers Make Time Fly

MOJAVE —  The Lockheed P-38 fighter sitting in a hangar at Mojave Airport is partly dismantled but still a graceful sight--looking something like a giant catamaran delicately perched on landing gear.

For the past two years, technicians have been laboring to make it look like new again--fabricating aluminum replacement panels for worn sections of the war bird’s skin, redoing the wiring, renovating the engines and installing cockpit instruments.

It’s a level of care that might be given to a revered fresco, a vintage Rolls-Royce or a religious icon. And it might be just as appropriate here.

Out of the nearly 10,000 P-38s that came off the Lockheed assembly line in Burbank during World War II, only eight survive in good enough condition to still fly, according to aviation buffs.

Renowned for its speed, long range and ability to wage combat at high altitudes, the plane was nicknamed “Der Gabelschwanz Teufelf” (“The Fork-Tailed Devil”) by German pilots who had to face it. The P-38 also provided thousands of jobs for Rosie the Riveters and helped turn Burbank into a world-famous center for aviation innovation and manufacturing.

But after the war, P-38s were considered junk to be dismantled for scrap or sold for a penny on the dollar.

“They weren’t seen as being anything valuable,” said John Gilbert, historian at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, which will display the P-38 now undergoing renovation. “Jets had arrived. Airplanes were being phased out of the military.”

One era’s junk is another’s valuable heirloom.

A Prized Commodity

The plane’s rarity made it so prized that, in 1992, a team of scavengers dug a P-38 out from under 268 feet of ice in Greenland, where it had crash-landed in 1942. Others have been found in jungles and underwater.

The Museum of Flying first bought its P-38 in 1989, and almost immediately auctioned it off to raise operating funds. It went for just over $1.5 million, according to printed reports.

Museum of Flying founder David Price, who made his fortune in developing golf courses, bought the airplane back in 1995 for an undisclosed sum and turned it over to the museum on a long-term loan, according to the museum’s director, Dan Ryan. Price, who declined to give an interview, is also paying for the restoration.

If all goes well, the airplane will finally be ready later this year to take off and fly to the museum.

“We get an airplane like this in the museum, and sometimes you can go there and see veterans who flew it in the war, just standing there looking at it,” said Bruce Lockwood, 48, restoration director for the museum. “It means so much to them. You can see it in their faces.”

Guns, Not Cameras

The P-38’s 12-cylinder engines sit on metal stands in front of the plane, and are almost ready to be bolted on. They’re not originals.

“When it comes to the look of the airplane, we try and be as authentic as possible,” said Lockwood. “But these airplanes are meant to fly.”

The replacement engines are more technologically advanced than what was possible when the plane was built in 1944.

“When user-friendliness clashes with originality,” Lockwood said, “we compromise toward safety.”

And a bit toward showmanship. Although most of the P-38s were fighters equipped with four machine guns, this particular airplane was used during the war for high altitude air reconnaissance. Instead of guns, it had cameras.

During restoration a camera mount was removed and in its place, four menacing guns stick out of the fuselage just above the plane’s nose.

Are they operational?

“Not really,” Lockwood said with a sheepish smile. “The gun barrels aren’t attached to anything that could fire shots. They’re just for looks.”

The P-38 was designed in the late 1930s by a team that included Kelly Johnson, who later became the legendary head of Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” facility that created some of the most famous postwar military aircraft.

It was designed to travel at a highly respectable 400 mph and to cover up to 1,500 miles per mission. It was equipped with turbochargers that used exhaust gases to give the plane an extra boost at high altitudes.

The airplane’s speed created an unexpected problem that resulted in the deaths of a few of its early pilots. The P-38 was so fast that air compressed around it, making control difficult.

“Airplane designers didn’t have enough experience with high speeds at that point to know about compressibility,” said Gilbert. “Sometimes the aircraft would suddenly go nose down in the dive.”

When the nature of the problem was discovered, a set of electrically controlled flaps--called dive flaps--were installed to control it.

Boost to Local Economy

The fighter went on to be the first in the U.S. Army Air Corps fleet to shoot down a German aircraft, and its long range made it ideal for escorting bombers from Britain to Berlin and back, according to historical materials compiled by Lucent Technologies software developer Joe Baugher, who is also an airplane buff. The P-38’s range was especially valuable for the island-hopping style of warfare in the Pacific, and by the end of the war, it had shot down more Japanese aircraft than any other airplane.

The P-38 was also a huge boost to the local economy. At the peak of production, the Lockheed plant in Burbank had a work force of 9,400, according to Jackson Mayer’s “Burbank History.”

At war’s end, most of the P-38s not scrapped were sent to foreign air forces or sold to aerial survey companies.

Winning Bid of $1.5 Million

The plane now in the Museum of Flying collection was first sold to a survey company in Tulsa, Okla. It changed hands among a couple more survey outfits before a series of private collectors took ownership, starting in the 1960s, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.

In 1972, one of the private owners crashed the airplane while landing in Paris, Texas, putting it out of service for several years. It was patched up and eventually acquired by well-known collector John Silberman, who sold it to the museum in 1989.

Gilbert said it was bought to attract attention to the museum’s first fund-raising airplane auction. The 1990 event was a mixed success, but the P-38 was a huge hit and drew a top bid of more than $1.5 million from Orange County home builder William Lyons.

After Price got the P-38 back, it was shown at the museum for a couple years and then flown to Mojave for renovation. Lockwood said his team has been working on it between the regularly scheduled maintenance on the museum’s flying fleet. Also in the hangar currently are a Japanese Mitsubishi Zero in pristine condition and a newly acquired Russian Yak fighter.

Lockwood was a house builder and pilot in Alaska when he fell into the restoration business. During a time when he was having trouble finding work, he sold an airplane he had restored to a collector in Texas, who asked him to stay on and take care of the aircraft in his personal museum.

A dozen years ago, Lockwood’s reputation as a guy who could take almost demolished planes and make them fly again led to an offer from the Museum of Flying.

Living the Good Life

For Lockwood, who commutes daily by car to the museum’s Mojave facility from the Tehachapi area, it’s a good life.

“I get to work with my hands on something I love,” he said, thumbing through an original P-38 service manual. “At the end of the day, there’s nothing better than that.”

“Except,” he said after a pause, “to get in a plane you’ve been working on and fly it.”