Where next, to find old warbirds?

[mmatthej1]

It rather seems that 'underground' Burma is a failure, as a place for finding warbirds, so I just wonder where the 'next' best area for new discovies might be?

A lot of interesting finds have come out of FSU in recent years, also various lakes in Scandanavia & USA - where next?

I wonder, in particular, about North Africa (recent events aside!) - surely a lot of aircraft put down in desert areas during WW2, many out in the less frequented parts. What has happened to them? Recovered by locals for scrap? Buried?

The recent P-40 find shows what might be out there..............

[Lukeafb1]

Slight thread creep here, but in the early 50s my father was posted to Niarobi, Kenya, with rest of family in tow.

One afternoon I and a group of friends (all about 8 years old) were enacting a safari on a large area of undeveloped grassland and came across an old truck body. On clambering inside it, we found a load (about 10) of guns. Full of bravado, we each lugged one of these ‘guns’ back to the camp in which we lived. It turned out, when our fathers spied them, that they were all turret cannons from (it was believed by the grown ups) B17s or Hudsons and all were close to being in working order. Suffice to say, they were confiscated and the British Army quickly removed all evidence and the truck!
:):)

[Nopax,thanx]

I think that you've covered it all really; some wrecks remain, known about, in Russia and will stay where they are for now; Scandinavia has a number of well-documented aircraft, some in the water and some in remote places, which could be recovered if resources allow.

Plenty of stuff in the Atlantic, Pacific and Med of course, but usually too far gone to yield anything substantial.

The P-40 was a real surprise to everyone, even a number of self-proclaimed experts who wrote it off as a spoof model uploaded onto the finder's website. Most, if not everything in the desert would be raided by the locals, although the Sahara is one big place, as the P-40 proved. So it's possible, but personally I think that the world's been done now, so unless anyone is going the fetch that B-52 that the Daily Star discovered on the Moon :p then we've found it all.

[astir 8]

That's a bit of an absolute statement! I should imagine there's still unknown stuff about.

It's just that we don't know where it is!


Big freshwater lakes are still yielding fairly intact airframes. Russia is still a very big place with a lot of forest. And there is probably the odd person with secrets in the back barn.

But the "buried intact airframes" rumours have run and run and to the best of my knowledge have all been unfulfilled - which is a pity. :sad::sad:

[ZH875]

Whatever old warbird you could ever desire is buried in a proper packing crate, wrapped in waterproof material, in my very overgrown garden.

Should anyone like to clear my weeds and dig the garden looking for them, I will be very happy to accommodate.:O

[ICT_SLB]

Probably the best chance for rebuildable airframes is in any of the many freshwater lakes in the US & Canada. Apart from the Great Lakes, Lake Washington would probably be one of the most promising - apart from its proximity to Boeing (one of the first Lazy B seaplanes was lost "under the log booms at Renton") - it's been used as a seaplane base while Sandy Point was a major USN training base. Water temperature at the bottom of all of them is close to freezing with very little oxygen and no shipworm so preservation should be good.