Indeed. The U.S. Army Air Force had over 80,000 planes in its inventory at one time during WW2, and by the end of the war, had built nearly 300,000 planes. See [0] for details.
This coverage leaves out that the expedition and recovery were financed by one of the successful sons of Middlesboro, Kentucky, who put the refurbished plane in a museum airstrip in that town as a trophy. Disclaimer: family hails from near there and Middlesboro needs all the promotion it can muster.
Geez, I was wondering when the plot was going to thicken with the discovery of the dead body of a girl while searching for plane wrecks. I wish a TL;DR at the top would state that the "Girl" is what they named the plane...
Yes, excluding the title, the first reference is the sixteenth paragraph.
I suppose I might've guessed from the leading photo, had I not already seen comments here, but I only clicked into the comments assuming it was some centuries/millenia old body/remnants.
Heh, Vernon(team machinist) used to do specialty welding work for my friends & I back in the day. Was inspiring & heartbreaking to hear him tell his 1st hand account. An amazing & talented man.
It's not an uncommon design for modern VTOL UAVs that can transition into single motor forward flight on wings. The twin boom design supports a quadcopter lift system. This is a Chinese airframe manufacturer, people add their own motors and electronics.
What is the purpose of this dangerous and risky salvage mission? What benefit is yielded as a result of the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent recovering and restoring this antique?
I'm surprised it's not more common in the warbird world. It seems like on the deep restorations that's basically what they're doing. Looking a build logs it looks like huge percentages of the aircraft are built from scratch.
I'm often amazed at the scale of war-time manufacturing production. According to wikipedia, there were over 15,000 P-51s and over 12,000 B-17 made.