Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Shrike on May 29, 2024, 04:11:11 PM
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Apparently, Richard Bong's P-38 was recovered recently. Another pilot was flying his plane when it encountered mechanical problems and crashed in a jungle over Papua New Guinea. I read the pilot survived.
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2024-05-23/p-38-marge-richard-bong-wwii-new-guinea-13957144.html
I never realized he died on a P-80 test flight just a few days before the end of WWII.
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I read there that they recovered a small piece with a serial number on it, The crash site was described as a more or less vertical impact hard enough to bury the engines below ground. Article also says there are no plans to dig the plane up, so not really a recovery. A discovery of the wreck certainly but no recovery of it. be nice to have a few fragments for museum purposes.
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My journalism career is over :). I saw another article which looked like part of the nose art was recovered but they must have been showing an image of the plane.