Curtiss museum recreates famous World War II fighter

The Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport is creating its own version of Frankenstein's monster.

The museum is working to recreate the iconic World War II-era Curtiss P-40 fighter plane. But rather than restore a single P-40, museum volunteers are cobbling together parts from three different planes that crashed.

It's a painstaking process that has taken several years, but the resulting composite fighter is finally taking shape, and the public is invited to watch as history unfolds.

"We have a handful of (restoration) projects at the moment, but the big one, the sexiest one, is still the P-40. They've been working on it daily for three or four years. It’s a huge project," said Curtiss museum Executive Director Ben Johnson.

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"It was really a mess. It's a combination of three different planes that were sunk in a swamp in Florida (and another location) for over 40 years," Johnson said. "They're taking the rusting hulks of three different planes. They spent time and money digging them out. They bounced around to a few different owners and eventually got to our restoration team."

The Curtiss P-40, with its signature toothy visage painted on the front of the aircraft, is one of the most famous fighters from World War II.

The P-40 was manufactured by the company founded by aviation pioneer Glenn H. Curtiss, and it first flew in 1938. It was used by most Allied powers during the war.

Two of the P-40s the museum owns crashed in the Florida Everglades during a 1945 training mission, and the other went down on St. Simon Island in Georgia.

When the museum acquired the planes, they were little more than piles of unrecognizable wreckage.

"It really was just junk, not even remotely resembling an airplane. What they have done with it is nothing short of amazing," Johnson said. "They used as much of the original metal work as possible. A fair amount was nonexistent or not salvageable. They've done a large amount of sheet metal work to fill in the gaps. You can draw a contrast between the bright, shiny new metal versus the old patina. You use what you can, and you know what’s missing. We’ve got 7,000 or 8,000 pages of original schematics."

It will still be a few years before the group of experienced volunteers finishes the restoration, but rather than wait to unveil the finished product, the museum decided to let visitors watch the team perform its magic.

"The public can see it in progress. Ask the guys what their deadline is, and most of our guys with gallows humor say they hope to finish it before they die," Johnson said. "They have at least another two or three good years of work left.

"We've got a core group of eight to 10 people, all volunteers," he said. "Curtiss has a long history of restoring or replicating aircraft, so over the years, they built from scratch or restored at least 10 or 15 different airplanes, some of which flew, a lot didn’t. This is just the next project in line."

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For more information

• To learn more about the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, call 607-569-2160 or go to glennhcurtissmuseum.org.