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The Corsair's rear fuselage. This area required a good deal of restoration, as the fuselage broke a few feet beind the cockpit during the crash. Unique to the variant, early -1 Corsairs had a life raft storage compartment in the turtle decking. You can see the panel lines in the fuselage immediately to the rear of the scalloped rear view cockpit window. (photo by Joel Edwards)
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It is now just over seven years since F4U-1 Corsair Bu.02465 rose to the surface of Lake Michigan following a retrieval effort sponsored by Chuck Greenhill. As with many other Lake Michigan aircraft salvage operations, the experts at A & T Recovery were behind this successful endeavor. The Corsair had slumbered at the bottom of Lake Michigan for seven decades, following a landing accident aboard the training carrier USS Wolverine on June 12th, 1943. Her pilot at the time, Ens Carl Harold “Harry” Johnson survived the ordeal almost unscathed, though sadly lost his life later that year in an aerial collision over Hawaii.
This Corsair, the world’s only substantially original survivor of the earliest breed of production Corsairs, has been under restoration at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida since she arrived there in November, 2010. While the museum has no official timeline on when the aircraft will be ready for display, a lot of work has taken place in the intervening years, with most of the major structural elements now complete. Recently, Joel Edwards visited the museum’s restoration shop and took a great series of images which he agreed to share with us, and we thought our readers would love to see them too. Many thanks indeed to Joel for this update!
Richard Mallory Allnutt's aviation passion ignited at the 1974 Farnborough Airshow. Raised in 1970s Britain, he was immersed in WWII aviation lore. Moving to Washington DC, he frequented the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum, meeting aviation legends.
After grad school, Richard worked for Lockheed-Martin but stayed devoted to aviation, volunteering at museums and honing his photography skills. In 2013, he became the founding editor of Warbirds News, now Vintage Aviation News. With around 800 articles written, he focuses on supporting grassroots aviation groups.
Richard values the connections made in the aviation community and is proud to help grow Vintage Aviation News.