Warbird Information Exchange

I assume Flak-Bait was originally dismantled to get it into storage at the Garber Facility. I don't think there was room in those buildings for a fully assembled plane as large as the B-26.
I toured the Garber Facility twice in the early 80's when I was a teenager. I don't remember seeing the wings and fuselage of Flak-Bait however, they didn't take you into every building. I do remember seeing the P-61 fuselage in the dark in one of the storage buildings. At the time, the Enola Gay and Swoose were in storage and you could walk right up to them. As a teenager, I was thrilled.

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"Everyone wants to live here (New Jersey), evidenced by the fact that it has the highest population per capita in the U.S..."

I believe FB was disassembled and crated while still in Europe for shipment back to the States. The Marauders were immediately retired when the war ended, and almost all that were overseas were scrapped onsite. I presume FB was one of the aircraft originally stored at the facility near Chicgao. Sadly, many of those were scrapped when the Military repossessed the building during the Korean War..it's rather miraculous that all of FB has survived. Somewhere I've got an old issue of Airpower Magazine from the 1970s (where I first read about FB as a teenager.) The article has a photo of the tail section, and as I recall the caption read something like "Other than some superficial dirt, the aircraft emerged from decades of storage in excellent condition."

SN

Those of us who are relative oldtimers remember that when the NASM museum on the Mall opened in 1976, to commemorate the US bicentennial, there was a WWII gallery that included the FB nose, with the exhibit so close that you could actually touch the fuselage just behind the glass nose. Many did, and wore off the original paint there.

I made maybe a dozen visits to Garber starting in January 1977 with the first public opening. With time, I visited just about every large and small building, yet I too do not remember seeing the FB wings or remaining fuselage. Steve may be right, perhaps still crated in the deep storage of one of the small buildings.

With the just announced 98-foot expansion of the UH hangar, I think both the FB and Lincoln-Standard priorities have been elevated from simple storage back to an active restoration, or in the case of FB, preservation in original state as much as possible. The space in the restoration hangar is going to be needed for other projects to include reassemblies, restorations, the set-ups for hanging aircraft, and new accessions. They need a hangar-cam so we can keep up.

The press releases for the expansion state that there will be a lot of work in the central, WWII area of the hangar. There is not much growth space there, and I guess that FB will move to the spot currently occupied by the SR-71, which would go into the expanded Modern Aviation portion of the hangar. The Shoo-Shoo may go into a close back-to-back embrace of the Enola Gay?

There are several WWII era aircraft that were on display in the NMB (national mall building) prior to transformation, these including the Me.262, Macchi.202, Spitfire Mk.VII, A6M5 Zero, XP.80 Shooting Star and, just after the war, FH.1 Phantom and NJ-1 Fury jets that are in storage at UH and would be reassembled and moved onto the UH floor. The Mosquito will come over from Garber, and I hope the P.39, and perhaps some German and Japanese ac. The B-25 remains in the Ramsey building, near Dulles. Perhaps we might see donation of a military DC-3 or something else?

I hope that I can keep in good health while all this happens.

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Kevin McCartney